At the end of a week Dorothy avowed herself disappointed. “I never did think much of poor dear mamma’s taste, you know, Uncle Hutchinson,” she said, with her customary frankness, “and what she found to like in this place I’m sure I can’t imagine. It’s tawdry and it’s vulgar; and as for its morals, I think that it’s worse than Monte Carlo. I suppose that there is a nice side to it, for I do see a few nice people; but, somehow, they all seem to stand off from each other as though they were afraid here to take any chances at all with strangers. And I don’t blame them, Uncle Hutchinson, for I feel just that way myself. What you ought to have done was to have hired a cottage, and then people would have taken the trouble to find out about us; and when they’d found that we were not all sorts of horrid things we should have got into the right set, and no doubt, at least if we’d stayed here through August, we should have had a very nice time. “But we’re not having a nice time, here at this noisy hotel, Uncle Hutchinson, where the band can’t keep quiet for half an hour at a time, and where the only notion that people seem to have of amusement is to overdress themselves and wear diamonds to dinner and sit in crowds on the verandas and dance at night with any stranger who can get another stranger to introduce him and to drive over on fine afternoons to that place by the lake and drink mixed drinks until some of them actually get tipsy. I really think that it all is positively horrid. And so I’m quite willing now to go to the White Sulphur. It is stupid, I know, but I’ve always heard that it is intensely respectable. I will get my packing all done this afternoon, and we will start to-morrow morning; and I think that you’d better go and telegraph for rooms right away.” But to Dorothy’s surprise, and also to her chagrin, Mr. Port refused to entertain her proposition. He fully agreed with her in her derogatory estimate of Saratoga life as found at Saratoga hotels; and he cherished also a private grief incident to his (mistaken) belief that the cooking was not so good as he remembered it, bright in the glamour of his sound digestion in his youthful past. On the other hand, however, the waters certainly were having a most salutary effect upon his liver; and the move to Virginia would involve spending two days of hot weather in toilsome travel, sustained only by such food as railway restaurants afford. Therefore Mr. Port declared decidedly that until the end of July they would remain where they were--and so gave his niece the doubtful pleasure of an entirely new experience by compelling her to do something that she did not want to do at all. It was a comfort to Mr. Port, in later years, to remember that he had got ahead of Dorothy once, anyhow.