She was an old-fashioned girl. There had almost always been a young man in her life about whom, for a while, she wove more or less intensely romantic fancies. They came; they went. But almost always there was one. She raised her lovely face and looked at the moon, and made an unspoken confession. There had always been one. Well, now there was another! XVI When the real season opened, you might have thought that the whole venture was Mr. Sam Langham's and that he had risked the whole of his money in it. Without being officious, he had words of anxious advice for the Darlings, severally and collectively. His early breakfasts in Smoke House with Mary, the chef beaming upon the efficient and friendly pair, lost something of their free and easy social quality, and became opportunities for the gravest discussions of ways and means. The opening day would see every spare room in the place occupied--by a man. To Mary it seemed a little curious that so few women, so few families, and so many bachelors had applied for rooms. But to Sam Langham the reasons for this were clear and definite. "It was the picture in the first issues of your advertisement that did it. I only compliment and felicitate you when I say that every bachelor who saw that picture must have made up his mind to come here if he possibly could. And that every woman who saw it must have felt that she could spend a happier summer somewhere else. Now, if you had circulated a picture of half a dozen men, each as good-looking as your brother Arthur, the results would have been just the opposite." "Women aren't such idiots about other women's looks as you think they are," said Mary. "I didn't say they were idiots; I intimated that they were sensible. The prettiest woman at a summer resort always has a good time--not the best, necessarily, but very good. Now, no woman could look at that picture of you and your sisters and expect to be considered the prettiest woman _here_. Could she, Chef?" Chef laughed a loud, scornful, defiant, gesticulant, Gallic laugh. His good-natured features focussed into a scathing Parisian sneer; he turned a delicate omelette over in the air and said, "Lala!" "There are," continued Mr. Langham, "only half a dozen women in the world who can compare in looks with you and your sisters. There's the Princess Oducalchi--your mother. There's the Countess of Kingston, Mrs. Waring, Miss Virginia Clark--but these merely compare. They don't compete." Mr. Langham tried to look very sly and wicked, and he sang in a humming voice: "Oh, to be a Mussulman, now that spring is here." "Coffee?" said Mary. "Please."