“She went through here a while ago. She’s in the day coaches, I guess, because this is the last of the Pullmans.” No, thought Ben, this isn’t the last of the Pullmans, there’s another one ahead of it. I noticed it specially when we got on: it’s called _Godiva_ and reminded me to ask Ruth if she’d brought her bathing suit.--But he refrained from correcting her, waiting patiently to hear what was coming. “Of course, I’m not sure, it’s so long since I’ve seen her, ages and ages, but I think it was Joyce Clyde.” Ben made a polite murmur of interested surprise, allowing his eyebrows to stretch themselves a little and pursing his lips gently to show attention. But the name meant nothing to him. “I shouldn’t wonder if she’s on her way to the Island too. You remember, she was there one summer when we were all children. I wouldn’t have known her, but I saw her picture in a magazine not long ago. She’s some kind of artist, I think. She always was a queer kid.” Ben’s recollection of old days on the Island was mostly limited to a strip of yellow shore. He remembered catboats and knife-edged grasses, a dock with barnacled piles, learning to make a half-hitch in wet ropes, and the freckled, gap-toothed faces of some other small boys. He remembered splintery plank walks among masses of poison ivy, the puckered white feet of a man who had been drowned, the sour stink of his aquarium of hermit crabs, dead because he forgot to change their water. He remembered an older boy who taught the small fry obscene rhymes. The cheerful disgusting hazards of being young were now safely over, thank goodness. The orderly exacting routine of business was enough to keep a man amused. Twenty-one years is a long time: yet turning the focus of memory a little more sharply he caught an unexpected glimpse of a friendly fat waitress at the old wooden hotel who used to bring him bowls of clam chowder; and some of the grown-ups were still visible. But the small girls seemed to have evaporated, fogged out. Even Ruth herself. He could only recall a distant shrilling of hide-and-seek played after dusk among the sand hills, the running flutter of pink cotton dresses. Why don’t little girls wear pink nowadays, he wondered. “Did she wear a pink dress?” “Gracious, I don’t know. She had green eyes and was awfully shy. If that _was_ her, she’s turned out more attractive than I would have thought. Funny, she hasn’t bobbed her hair: I thought all artists were supposed to do that.” Ben wasn’t greatly interested. His private conviction was that the party would be a bore anyhow: but he couldn’t very well return to the newspaper while Ruth was talking. He took off his glasses and polished them. “What does her husband do?” “Her husband? She hasn’t got one. I suppose she’s wedded to her art. I don’t think she’s the type that’s attractive to men.”