She had induced him to go with her and Zip to see the tiny furnished cottage she had hired for the summer in Lakeville--the cheerfully vulgar suburb of Laketon where persons of her own sort played at farming. Lakeville was only a handful of flimsy frame houses scattered along under the trees close to the sedgy edge of the lake. Wooden piers ran out into deep water, and, when the season opened, collected joggling fleets of skiffs and canoes about their slimy piles. As yet, the houses were unoccupied, but the spirit of previous tenants, as indicated by names painted above the doors--"Bide-a-Wee," and "Herestoyou"--had been very social. Sentimental minds were confessed in "Rippling Waves," and "Sweet Homes." Fred's "bungalow," its shingled sides weathered to an inoffensive gray, was labeled, over its tiny piazza, "Sunrise Cottage." "I think that's why I took it," she told Mr. Weston, when, having inspected its shoddy interior and paused on the porch to look at the far-off church spire of Laketon, they wandered down to a ledge of rock that jutted out into the lake; "women are going to raise the sun of freedom!" "I hope they won't, accidentally, raise Cain," he murmured. "Fred, the lamp on your center-table almost put my eyes out! Do the Lakevillians really think that kind of junk beautiful?" "They do. But don't be cocky; we thought it beautiful ourselves not so very long ago--if it was only expensive enough! Look at the parlor in Payton Street." "That magenta shade with the autumn leaves on it is the most horrible thing I ever saw," he said, shuddering. "I shall have lots of candles and a student's lamp to mitigate it," she comforted him. They had settled down on the rock, Zip dozing against Fred's knee. It was an exquisite May afternoon. Everything was very still; once a bird fluted in the distance, and once, on the piazza of a boarded-up cottage, a chipmunk scurried through the drift of last year's leaves. A haze of heat lay on the water that crinkled sometimes under a cat's-paw of wind, and then lapped faintly in the sedges. The woods, crowding close to the shore, were showing the furry grayness of young oak leaves, and here and there a maple smoldered into flame. Frederica, absently poking a twig under patches of lichen and flaking them off into the water, was saying to herself that in about six months Howard Maitland would be at home. "Lakeville is so unnecessarily hideous," Mr. Weston meditated; "I can't see why you should like it." "Because my friends come here--people who _work_! I'm going to start a suffrage club for them." "How grateful they will be!" he said. His amiability when he was bored was very marked.