PECKHAM, with his wife and Miss Mellish, was walking along the shore, calling Miss Mellish’s attention to the rock-structure of the coast, watching with his restless eye for marine specimens at the margin of the water.

Mrs. Peckham could not feel any great enthusiasm for kelp or sea-lettuce, hermit-crabs, or limpets; but Miss Mellish, in her room at the hotel, had a comprehensive collection of stones and shells which Peckham had gathered for her, and which she intended to utilize in an illustrated lecture to her pupils in Troy after her return in the autumn.

The brisk breeze, as Peckham had been at pains to ascertain, was blowing straight from Brazil; the white sails of catboats dotted the water, which shimmered, the tenderest of blues; farther out to sea, a string of black coalbarges moved slowly to the westward.

‘Ah!’ Peckham exclaimed suddenly, his eye having caught sight of a bit of treasure. ‘ A finger-sponge! ’

He sprang nimbly forward to get the treasure, and Miss Mellish in her eagerness half followed him.

‘Look out!’ he cried. ‘You’ll get wet! ’

His agility saved him from the wave that rolled in larger than its fellows, and Miss Mellish also saved herself from the threatened catastrophe, lifting her skirt a trifle with a motion that was precipitate but maidenly.

Mrs. Peckham indulgently waited while this little comedy played itself out, and then walked on with her companions, who had become absorbed in the curious structure of the sponge.

Mrs. Peckham, in her dress, was pleasantly addicted to soft fabrics and cool colors. She had put on a little middle-aged plumpness; but, aside from that, the years had dealt lightly with her. There were but few threads of gray in the brown hair that curled above her forehead; her comfortable face had become fuller, her features less delicate with the passage of time. Miss Mellish’s features, on the contrary, had become more delicate as the years passed. She retained the girlish air which maiden ladies often retain all their lives long. She carried herself very erect, looked whomever she talked with straight in the eye with her earnest gray eyes, and walked with a business-like briskness that contrasted strongly with Mrs. Peckham’s indolent motions. Peckham, himself, was nothing but briskness from top to toe. There was not an ounce of superfluous flesh in his anatomy; his fifty years had not brought him a single gray hair. At the present moment, the youthfulness of his appearance was increased by his gray flannels and hisouting shirt with a flowing tie; the sea-tan on his lean face heightened the blue of his eyes.

The three had been intimate friends in their early days in Troy, although they had not seen as much of each other afterwards as they always said they wanted to. In fact, away back in Troy, it had been a question with Peckham which one to ask to share his name. Possibly the election had fallen to Clara because it was easy, somehow, to tell her that he loved her. Emma Mellish was the kind of girl it would be hard to tell a thing like that to. Evidently other men had experienced the same difficulty that Peckham had experienced.

Never having told his love, it had the charm of the unexpressed; the memory of his early attachment was sweetly sad, like a pale, pathetic ghost; but during the present sojourn, the ghost, to Peckham’s vague disquiet, had assumed something of the hue of life. Emma’s old attraction for him seemed to have come back; and although the relation was absolutely tacit, Miss Mellish was perfectly aware of it, and Mrs. Peckham felt it the most keenly of them all.

Toward many things Miss Mellish’s attitude was tacit; she felt rather than thought that Clara Peckham, through her absorption in domestic duties, had missed the higher things of life, and had rendered herself incapable of meeting her husband on the intellectual plane where he was happiest and most at home; and Mrs. Peckham, on the other hand, pitied Emma for her state of single-blessedness and for the necessity that had driven her to teaching school, little dreaming that moulding immature minds was the most fascinating interest in Emma Mellish’s life.

Peckham’s attitude toward everything was of a masculine simplicity. He was devoted to his business, the manufacture of a smoke-consuming device of his own invention, which had prospered beyond his fondest hopes; he loved his three daughters and his one son, who, in obedience to the universal instinct to scatter, were now enjoying the summer in four separate watering-places, unconsciously seeking their mates; he loved his home; and, until the visit to Eastport Harbor, he had thought that he loved his wife.

His existence in the city had fallen into a routine which delighted his orderly mind. All day he was busy at his factory in lower Manhattan, inventing improvements in his smoke-consuming device, experimenting with recalcitrant fuels, watching his sales grow. Every evening he spent in his oldfashioned house on Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, reading scientific books or the Brooklyn Eagle, unless his wife and he attended a symphony concert at the new Academy of Music or listened to a lecture of the Brooklyn Institute. Peckham preferred the Brooklyn Institute lectures; and Mrs. Peckham preferred the symphony concerts; but, as good Brooklynites, they attended both.

This routine was broken by Mrs. Peckham herself. The children, having grown up and dispersed for the summer with the friends of their generation, left Mrs. Peckham to concentrate the expression of her maternal instinct on her husband. She said he was getting thin and wearing himself out in his business; she insisted that he take a long vacation; and Miss Mellish having mentioned in a letter that she purposed spending the summer at a charming resort in a corner of the Massachusetts coast, the Peckhams joined her at Eastport Harbor.

Peckham found the enforced idleness of the place the hardest work he had ever done. The life led by his fellow guests at the hotel perplexed him; it seemed to have no meaning. Neither Miss Mellish nor his wife nor himself were sea-bathers or dancers; but Mrs. Peckham was placidly content to sit on the veranda, talking and tatting with other ladies similarly engaged; and Emma Mellish found great enjoyment and inspiration in long walks amid the wide, wonderful spaces of sea and sky.

She was very fond of landscapes; and the hand that did n’t hold her parasol generally held some treasured volume closed at a choice passage on her slender forefinger. She had brought with her a formidable collection of books, ranging from The Sea Beach at Ebb-tide to The Quintessence of Ibsenism. The Sea Beach at Ebb-tide had been Peckham’s salvation; later he had made a thorough investigation of the only local industry, poultry-raising; but at the end of a month, he felt that he was sufficiently informed as to marine growths, the respective merits of White Brahmas and Rhode Island Reds, and the advantages of incubators over the natural method.

The trio approached the bathing-pavilion. It was eleven o’clock, the fashionable hour. Practically all the guests of the hotel were in the pavilion, or on the sands, or in the sea. Babies played with their tin pails and shovels; mothers, in light, summery dresses, sat on the sand under gay parasols; stout, middle-aged men, looking strangely vulnerable and of an unhealthy whiteness in their bathing-suits, went down to the water for a gasping plunge and a quick, shivery return; children with the charming slenderness of infancy, excited, happy, frightened, ventured into the water until it reached their knees.

Four or five bronzed young men had improvised a game of pitch-and-toss, umpired by a frenzied fox-terrier; a youth and maiden, just emerged from the water, were running a race for the sake of circulation and the fun of it; other youths and maidens who had not yet entered the water lay on the beach, covering each other with sand with an air of intimacy and unconventionality possibly more apparent than real. The surf was dotted with bobbing heads and flashing arms; shouts and laughter rose from it,and nowand then a scream of delighted terror. The tonic breeze from Brazil blew on bathers and spectators alike; even the most timid spectator was enjoying an involuntary bath of the August sunshine.

Peckham viewed this scene with a certain disquiet; he knew there was no reason why he should disapprove of it, and yet he couldn’t give it his approval, He felt a strange nostalgia, sad, uncomfortable, seductively sweet. He wanted to plunge into the ocean, he wanted to join the game of pitch-and-toss, he wanted to run a foot-race, he wanted to be buried in the sand.

Neither Emma nor Clara considered this scene as curiously as Peckham did. Indefatigable Miss Mellish announced her purpose to continue her quest for marine treasures along the beach; and Mrs. Peckham remarked that she was somewhat tired, and would seek the shelter of the hotel veranda; she was not overfond of uncomfortable positions on the shifting sands. Peckham would have preferred to remain to watch the bathers or to accompany Miss Mellish in her quest, — during his sojourn at Eastport Harbor he had not been alone with Miss Mellish for ten minutes, — but with that invisible chain connecting married people, he turned his back alike on the bathers and Miss Mellish, and went with his wife to the hotel.

This structure, directly back of the bathing-beach, had originally been a large farmhouse, but in adapting itself to its new destiny had thrown out several heterogeneous extensions that followed the conformation of the low, granite ledge, so that, in passing from one part to another, guests were forced either to go down two steps or to go up three. There was a broad modern veranda across the front of the main building, giving a view of the bathingpavilion, the beach, the sea; and Mrs. Peckham without undue haste selected a comfortable rocking-chair, and drew her tatting utensils from her pocket. The veranda was deserted; even the man from New Haven with incipient locomotor ataxia had managed to shuffle down to the beach.

Mrs. Peckham had nothing to say to her husband, and said it; Peckham had as little to say to his wife. He had never noticed until this visit to Eastport Harbor how little he and his wife had to say to each other when alone. Early in his married life, he had tried to interest her in the technical side of his business, but she never waxed enthusiastic over grate-bars or drafts, although she was interested in the financial side of his affairs. Peckham was not a smoker, nor had he been initiated into the mysteries of tatting, so that at the present moment he could express his native energy only by sitting in a rocking-chair and rocking with more or less vehemence.

This exercise, however, could not suffice him long. After a moment or two, he went to his room and returned with a book he was reading with a mystified interest. It was a copy of Man and Superman which Miss Mellish had loaned him from her comprehensive collection.

He had reached the fourth act, the stirring climax of the play, and as he sat beside his wife, who continued placidly to tat in silence, Peckham read with increased interest and diminished mystification. Tanner’s views of marriage, expressed with an abounding eloquence, echoed and made articulate his own feelings.

Peckham was accustomed to turn to his wife in any moral perplexity; his speech and her silence usually clarified his views; and he now turned to her to express the ideas brought into his mind by Man and Superman. He craftily attenuated his thoughts, however.

‘This fellow, Shaw, has written rather a suggestive book. It’s really a book against marriage, and there’s really something in it.’

‘Yes?’ said Mrs. Peckham, continuing her tatting.

‘He says that a married man decays like a thing that’s served its purpose; he describes husbands as greasy-eyed. He says that when a man marries, he renounces romance and freedom.’

‘And do you believe that?’

Mrs. Peckham looked at her husband with serious, sagacious eyes. Under her gaze, his own eager eyes dropped.

‘Well, a married man does give up his freedom. I felt that this morning.’

‘Why, what did you want to do this morning that you could n’t do?’

Peckham searched his mind a moment.

‘I wanted to stay on the beach; I wanted to go in bathing.’

‘Why did n’t you, then?’

‘Because I thought it my duty to come up here with you.’

Mrs. Peckham’s face had not lost its look of seriousness; and after the little pause that followed, she said slowly and gravely, ‘ Robert, I want you to feel free to do whatever you want to do.’

This ready permission irritated Peckham, he could not tell why. He got to his feet with one of his quick motions.

‘Well, I will,’ he said sulkily, and he put his hat on and walked away from her.

He had scarcely stepped off the veranda, however, before the irritation and the sulkiness vanished. Instead, he felt grateful to his wife for her ungrudging sanction. He thought what a good wife she was, and how much he cared for her. Her sanction had been formulated in the most general terms, and his expedition was without any definite objective; but the vagueness only added to the adventure of it. Wonderful possibilities seemed to lurk, invisible, in the golden air; he felt a lightness, as of a physical burden lifted from his shoulders; he felt somewhat as he had when, during his days of courtship, he took his joyous way to Clara’s house.

Insensibly, he had strolled toward the beach and the bathing-pavilion. The matrons, the children, the youths and maidens, the brawny young men, the frenzied fox-terrier, were still sporting on the shore; but, strangely enough, Peckham now felt no desire to join them. It was sufficient for him to realize that he was no longer an alien, to recognize a kinship with the matrons, the children, the fox-terrier, the youths and maidens who, in the clairvoyance of his mood, he now perceived were lovers distilling precious drops of happiness from the most commonplace of external acts. They were all part of his great adventure, and he was part of theirs.

Peckham felt a kinship also with the sea, the sky, the sands; and, turning his back on the surf-bathers and the sun-bathers, he walked along the beach. He was exhilarated by being alone; everything was familiar, but yet he looked at everything with a curious, new interest; the arching breakers, the pebbles rounded by the waves, bleached bits of Irish moss, the white, empty shells of sea-clams.

His was a solitary figure, more neutral in its gray flannels than the sands themselves, moving with slightly accelerated pace past the heaps of seaweed, piled beyond the reach of the envious waves against the time the farmers should come with their oxen to spread it on the land; past the crazy huddle of fishermen’s boathouses; and finally into the curve of beach where the dunes began, gigantic waves of sand, apparently as stationary as the waves of water were restlessly mobile, in reality constantly shifting and throwing into the wind their foam of sand in spite of their backing of beachgrass, tough, lustrous, sharp as swords.

This neutral figure, now moving rapidly, unconsciously approached a second figure, vivid and perfectly quiescent, the figure of a lady seated on the beach under a red parasol which gave to the stretch of sand a touch of color as charming as the tiny splash of vermilion in certain pictures.

Miss Mellish, her book closed on her finger, gazing at the ocean in a pleasurable frame of formless musing which she feared might have a tendency toward moral relaxation, did not notice Peckham’s approach; and she started when he suddenly appeared beside her, and, sitting down without speaking, shared with her the hospitable shadow of her parasol. She, on her part, did not speak; but signified her welcome by leaning a trifle toward him so as to give him a larger share of the circle of shade.

He was warm from his walk; his face was slightly flushed; as he took off his narrow-brimmed soft felt hat, the impress of the hat-band was left on his clustering, dampened hair. He had all the appearance of having come posthaste in search of her; he was obviously alone; but Miss Mellish instinctively placed these impressions in her large department of tacit things. What she did permit herself was the reflection that he looked very handsome. The impress of the hat-band had the effect of an antique fillet; his lean, eager face seemed more than ever to have been refined in the fire of thought. These innocent reflections, however, had a certain result; and a slight flush came to Miss Mellish’s face.

‘I’ve just finished reading Man and Superman,’ said Peckham.

These words, to Miss Mellish, contained the prophecy of a clarifying discussion consonant with the scenic solitude around them, the whole ocean before them, the dunes behind them, the empty beach stretching as far as eye could see on either hand; to Peckham, they fell with a leaden sound. Since leaving his wife, his thoughts had been winged and wordless; now, with the simple remark, ‘I’ve just finished reading Man and Superman,’ they seemed stricken in mid-flight.

In the responsive silence of the land, the responsive sounding of the sea, in the immensity of his mood, the sense of isolation from the common world of men, any spoken word of his would be a profanation. There came back to him the memory of sweet-scented early summer evenings in Troy when he had sat with Emma Mellish on the veranda, listening to high things. He forgot his children, his fifty years, his smoke-consuming device; he remembered only that he was alone with Emma; and the knowledge that his wife had authorized his expedition played through his emotions like a lambent flame.

He turned toward Miss Mellish and put his arm around her.

This action, performed half involuntarily, he had subconsciously prefigured as the crown and climax of his expedition; also subconsciously he had prefigured the coolness and the comfort he felt whenever he put his arm around his wife’s plump waist; so that to have his arm meet a straight, stiff, resisting surface was a disillusion and a shock.

Miss Mellish’s face had gone whiter than the sands and then almost as crimson as her parasol. She neither spoke nor turned her head; and almost instantly Peckham withdrew his lax arm from her waist.

‘Well, I guess I’d better be getting back to the hotel,’ he said, feeling like a schoolboy and rising awkwardly to his feet. ‘Clara will wonder what has become of me.’

Still Emma Mellish neither spoke nor turned her head. Gazing straight before her at the tossing waste of waters, she was contemplating the ruins of her most cherished ideal.

Peckham took his way back slowly, with bent head. The beach had suddenly become merely dry sand, the sea merely wet water. He idly noted the objects cast up by the waves, broken lobster-pots covered with green slime, empty flasks, and the empty hemispheres of oranges thrown from passing steamers; and it seemed that he was as sordid and slimy as they. For Tanner and his tirades, he felt a contempt mingled with anger. Peckham could n’t understand the mood in which he had left his wife. It had been like the effect of some insidious drug; but even in his present reaction, it still wore something of the fascination of the forbidden.

When he reached the bathing-beach, he found that the matrons and babies, the youths and maidens, had departed; in the surf, only a few strong swimmers still splashed in their incomprehensible sport. The fox-terrier patrolled the deserted beach, indomitably hopeful that the fun was not all over. He ran to Peckham and looked up at him, cocking his head on one side inquiringly. For an instant, the man and the dog gazed at each other, neither of them speaking.

Behind the pavilion, a belated youth was dousing a belated maiden under the shower-bath. She squealed and jumped from one leg to the other, while the youth grinned at her, showing teeth as long and strong as an ape’s. This couple were evidently not lovers; they were merely silly and vulgar. Peckham reflected how repulsive girls looked in wet bathing-suits.

Back of the pavilion, on its granite ledge, the hotel looked down at him like an accusing face with a hundred eyes; and toward it Peckham turned his obedient steps. Somewhere within it, his wife was waiting for him; and he experienced the bitter truth that a single false step always brings with it a train of consequences. How could he confess to Clara? Could he conceal his dereliction, like some husbands he had heard of?

Like the beach, the veranda was deserted. The bathers were engaged in beautifying themselves for land-conquests; soon, in duck skirts and flannel trousers, they would begin to gather on the veranda to wait with an idle, preprandial impatience for the big brass gong to shiver the air with its savage summons to the midday meal. Peckham’s reluctant feet led him indoors and upstairs.

Clara, in a dressing-sack, was seated before the bureau in their room, making one of the innumerable little votive offerings to her person that women are continually making. Even after all his married years, these votive offerings remained mysterious, supererogatory, charming. The reflection of her face in the mirror gave Peekham the mute welcome married people find sufficient for their need.

Clara had the faculty of endowing the most casual dwelling-place with a sense of home. A vase of asters brightened the table she had improvised into a sewing-table; photographs of his son and his three daughters, pained and disillusioned, looked at him from the wall.

‘Clara,’ said Peckham, ‘I’ve just put my arm around Emma Mellish.’

He had expected he hardly knew what; not, at any rate, that his wife would continue her toilet in silence and apparent calm.

’I walked up the beach,’ he went on, ‘and found her sitting there, and sat down beside her. Before I knew it, I had my arm around her, but I took it away at once. She did n’t like it, and I did n’t like it.’

He paused, and then, as his wife continued silent and engaged, he added desperately, ‘It’s mighty lucky, Clara, that I’m not a susceptible man.’

Mrs. Peekham put the finishing touch to her toilet. She got up and turned toward him with a laugh. It was not an angry laugh, or a mocking laugh; it was a smiling laugh, — kindly, comprehending, sympathetic. Clara, he knew not why, often laughed at things he said; and often, without understanding, he joined her. He did so now with rather a tremulous chirrup that seemed a solvent of all his trouble.

He went to his wife and put his arm around her. The comfortable, plump waist to which he was accustomed seemed like home, like a haven from perilous seas. Without realizing it, he felt as if she were his mother; realizing it thoroughly, she felt as if he were her child.

‘Clara,’ he said, ‘I want to get back to business; I want to get back to Brooklyn. We ought to open the house. Henry and the girls will be coming home after Labor Day.’

Mrs. Peckham, with a little answering pressure, disengaged herself from him to complete her preparations for the midday meal.

‘Very well,’ she said, ‘I’ll pack the trunks this afternoon.’

A grateful realization of her multitudinous ministrations swept over him.

‘I’ll help you pack them,’ he said in the magnanimity of the moment.