The quality referred to, then, is a certain result of the eternally pagan influence of the sun. For, say what you will, the sun is pagan. It says "Yea" to life. In its glorious rays it is ridiculously easy to forget the alleged beauties of another world. Under its scorching heat the snaky sinuousness of a basking cat seems more seductive than the image of a winged angel, and amid the gold it lavishes, nothing looks more loathsome, more repulsive, than the pale cheek of pious ill-health. In short it urges man and woman to a wanton enjoyment of life and their fellows; it recalls to them their relationship to the beasts of the field and the birds in the trees; it fills them with a careless thirst and hunger for the chief pastimes of these animals,--feeding, drinking, and procreation; and the more "exalted" practices of self-abnegation, self-sacrifice, and the mortification of the flesh, are easily forgotten in such a mood. Nothing goes wrong, nothing can go wrong, while the sun blazes and the flowers are beautiful. So thinks everybody who has survived Puritanism unscathed, so thought the majority of Brineweald's visitors that year, so thought Mrs. Delarayne and her party of eager young swains and still more eager virgins. Wantonness was in the air,--wantonness and beauty; and when these two imps of passion come together August is at its zenith. Mrs. Delarayne had been down at Brineweald a little under a week; Vanessa Vollenberg and the young Fearwells had already been of the party four whole days; Sir Joseph with Denis Malster and Guy Tyrrell, Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Tribe and Miss Mallowcoid had arrived at Brineweald Park twenty-four hours after the Delarayne household had been completed, and now everybody was busy settling down to the novelty of life, effacing the traces of strangeness wherever they appeared, and measuring each other's skill and power at pastimes not necessarily confined to swimming, golf, and tennis. Leonetta had been congratulated on her friend Vanessa. Mrs. Delarayne who had expected an over-dressed, heavy young lady, with Shylock countenance and shaggy negroid coiffure, had been not a little surprised when she saw alight on the Brineweald down platform a girl who, though distinctly Semitic in features, had all the refinement, good taste, and sobriety of a Gentile and a lady. It was a relief, to say the least, and when, in addition, she found her intelligent and a lively companion, she was devoutly thankful.