But for one I praise the place, and I believe that Marian Winwood also bears it no ill-will. For we two were very happy there. We took part in the "subscription euchres" whenever we could not in time devise an excuse which would pass muster with the haggard "entertainer." We danced conscientiously beneath the pink and green icing of the ball-room's ceiling, with all three of the band playing _Hearts and Flowers_; and with a dozen "chaperones"--whom I always suspected of taking in washing during the winter months,--lined up as closely as was possible to the door, as if in preparation for the hotel's catching fire any moment, to give us pessimistic observal. And having thus discharged our duty to society at large, we enjoyed ourselves tremendously. For instance, we would talk over the book I was going to write in the autumn. That was the main thing. Then one could golf, or drive, or--I blush to write it even now--croquet. Croquet, though, is a much maligned game, as you will immediately discover if you ever play it on the rambling lawn of the Chalybeate, about six in the afternoon, say, when the grass is greener than it is by ordinary, and the shadows are long, and the sun is well beneath the tree-tops of the Iron Bank, and your opponent makes a face at you occasionally, and on each side the old, one-storied cottages are builded of unusually red bricks and are quite ineffably asleep. Or again there is always the creek to divert yourself in. Once I caught five crawfishes there, while Marian waited on the bank; and afterward we found an old tomato-can and boiled them in it, and they came out a really gorgeous crimson. This was the afternoon that we were Spanish Inquisitors.... Oh, believe me, you can have quite a good time at the Chalybeate, if you set about it in the proper way. 2 Only it is true that sometimes, when it rained, say, with that hopeless insistency which, I protest, is unknown anywhere else in the world; and when Marian was not immediately accessible, and cigarettes were not quite satisfactory, because the entire universe was so sodden that matches had to be judiciously coaxed before they would strike; and when if you happened to be writing a fervid letter to Rosalind Jemmett, let us say, the ink would not dry for ever so long:--why, it is true that in these circumstances you would feel a shade too like the wicked Lord So-and-So of a melodrama to be comfortable.