“Your angel has had a lovely afternoon, Uncle Hutchinson, and she is sure that you have had a lovely afternoon too. And now that you’ve found what fun there is in looking at tennis, we’ll go every day, won’t we, dear? Sometimes, you know, you are just a little, just a very little prejudiced about things; but you are so good and sweet-tempered that your prejudices never last long, and so your angel cannot help loving you a great deal.” Mr. Port, who was not at all sweet-tempered at that moment, was prepared to reply to the first half of this speech in terms of some emphasis; for he was limping a little, and a shocking twinge took him in his left shoulder when he attempted to raise his arm. But Dorothy’s sudden shifting to polite personalities was of a nature to choke off his projected indignant utterance. Yet not feeling by any means prepared to meet in kind her pleasing manifestation of affection, Mr. Port was a little put to it to find any suitable form of response. After a moment’s reflection he abandoned the attempt to reply coherently, and contented himself with grunting. VI. Encouraged by the success that was attending her unselfish efforts to harmonize her own and her uncle’s conceptions of the temporal fitness of things, Miss Lee began to find life at the Pier quite supportable. “There’s not much to do here,” she declared, with her customary candor, “and the hotels--all ugly and all in a row--make it look like an overgrown charitable institution; and most of the people, I must say, are such a dismal lot that they might very well be the patients out for an airing. But, on the whole, I’ve been in several worse places, Uncle Hutchinson; and if only you’d take me to a hop now and then, instead of sitting every evening on the pokey hotel veranda talking Philadelphia twaddle with that stuffy old Mr. Pennington Brown, I might have rather a good time here.” “You will oblige me, Dorothy,” replied Mr. Port, “by refraining from using such a word as ‘stuffy’ in connection with a gentleman who belongs to one of the oldest and best families in Philadelphia, and who, moreover, is one of my most esteemed friends.” “But he _is_ stuffy, Uncle Hutchinson. He never talks about anything but who peoples’ grandfathers and grandmothers were; and _Watson’s Annals_ seems to be the only book that he ever has heard of. Indeed, I do truly think that he is the very stuffiest and stupidest old gentleman that I ever have known.”