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DAYTIMES, Woodard wasted little speech on the other guests at the summer hotel. Biddies and garrulous men—fools one and all, he told himself. They had come to be with nature, they said; but the clear, deep lake with its rocks and pointed firs, and the mountains beyond were merely a backdrop for their inane gabble. They had come for health and renewal, clucking of the ravages of city life. Yet scarcely a one but had acquired some absurd malady. They had turned the small hotel into a hospital for twitches and borborygms. As if, because they were paying their way, they must give the climate work to do. As if, thought Woodard, they were hiring the warm sunlight, the cool, sweet air, to mend their palsies, tachycardias, facial tics or rheumatic twinges.

Relishing the fact of being resented and the illusion of being sought after, he kept himself to himself.

But this sort of thing must not be carried too far. Directly after dinner, for fifteen minutes before his evening walk, he mingled with the rest as graciously as their recollections of the day's snubs permitted. He had settled upon this course early in the summer. Circulating, at the breakup of the dinner hour, among as many guests as time allowed, he fell in benignly with all topics, however foolish.

On the last of these fence-mending tours, he tuned in to elderly Mrs. Jenson. "But why," she was asking plaintively, "has poor Mr. Ward's body not risen?"

What a conversational godsend, that presumed drowning!