Adirondack Mountains (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Hotels -- Fiction; Inheritance and succession -- Fiction; Love stories; Siblings -- Fiction
Eve stood a little on the sand beach. She felt hotter and hotter, and
the pool looked cooler and cooler. Presently, a heavenly smile of
solution brightened her flushed, warm face, and she withdrew into a
shady clump of bushes. From this there came first the exclamation "Drag
it!" then a sound of some sort of a string being sharply broken in two,
and then there came from the clump of bushes Eve herself, looking for
all the world like a slice of the silver moon.
And as you may have seen the silver moon slip slowly into the sea, so
Eve vanished slowly into the pool--all but her shapely little round
head, with its crisp bright-brown hair and its lovely face, happy now,
exhilarated, and eager as are the faces of adventurers.
And Eve thought if one didn't have to eat, if one didn't end by being
cold, if one could make time stand still--she would choose to be always
and forever a slice of the silver moon, lolling in a mountain pool.
She had the kind of hair that wets to perfection. But it was not the
sort of permanent wave which lasts six months or so, costs twenty-five
dollars, and is inculcated by hours of alternate baking and shampooing.
Eve had always had a permanent wave. She feared neither fog nor rain,
nor water in any form of application. And so it was that, now and then,
as she lolled about the pool, she disappeared from one fortunate square
yard of surface and reappeared in another.
Half an hour had passed, when suddenly the mountain stillness was broken
by men's voices.
Eve was at the opposite side of the pool from where she had left her
clothes. Between her and the approaching voices was the little island.
She landed hastily upon this and hid herself among the bushes.
Three gross, fat men and one long, lean man, with a face like leather
and an Adam's apple that bobbed like a fisherman's float, came down to
the beach, sweating terribly, and cast thereon knapsacks, picnic
baskets, hatchets, fishing-tackle, and all the complicated paraphernalia
of amateurs about to cook their own lunch in the woods.
All but one had loud, coarse, carrying voices, and they all appeared to
belong to the ruling class. They appeared, in short, to have neither
education nor refinement nor charm nor anything to commend them as
leaders or examples. Eve wondered how it was possible for them to find
pleasure even in each other's company. They quarrelled, wrangled, found
fault, abused each other, or suddenly forgot their differences,
gathering about the fattest of the fat men and listening, almost
reverently, while he told a story. When he had finished, they would
throw their heads far back and scream with laughter. He must have told
wonderfully funny stories; but his voice was no more than a husky
whisper, so that Eve could not make head or tail of them.
After a while the whispering fat man produced from one of the baskets
four little glasses and a fat dark bottle. And shortly after there was
less wrangling and more laughter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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