The rooms were ceiled with soft-stained pine; the only pictures were a few sharply coloured prints; the fireplace was of the simplest — brick with a pine mantel; and everything possible had been built in: bookshelves, bureau, dressing-table, couch. The dishes, Hazel found, gently squealing with domestic fervour, were of the best five-and-ten-cent native pottery, made by handmade machinery; there were, incredibly, enough ash trays, and these devised to hold ashes and butts and not to display reproductions of the higher-class barnyard fauna; the screen doors closed tightly without a bang; and there was a shower as well as a smallish tub.

‘It’s swell!’ said Fred, with an idiotic look of bliss.

He paraded around and around the cottage, as proud as once he had been, years ago, when he had first become an owner of property. That had been one lot, with a four-room yellow house, but every foot was miraculously different from all other earth. Why, its one maple tree had roots and branches and a real bird’s-nest, and the sun clung to its trunk, as it never did elsewhere on the block!

He discovered that the name of their cottage was William Tyler Longwhale. Anyway, said Hazel, that was better than naming the cottages Romeo and Portia and Desdemona. They never did find out who the historical William Tyler Longwhale may have been, but Fred insisted on giving their hermitage its full fruity name.

They sat on their porch at dusk. There had been strawberry shortcake for dinner, down at the tavern; they were full of shortcake and humanitarianism. The meadow below them was hysterical with unusually late fireflies; it resembled a still, dark pool reflecting transient stars.

‘D’you realize,’ marvelled Hazel, ‘that this is the first time we’ve had a house that’s entirely our own?’

‘I had some such an idee,’ said Frederick William.

Not even to a sub-agent who might order fifty cars had Fred ever paid such court as he now was paying to Hazel. He had brought his clubs, and Hazel expected him to spend hours a day golfing, during which time she planned to do a little happy, unnecessary cleaning. But he was irritated at having to do anything, even follow the rules of golf. ‘Coupla days, what say we just stroll; not go anywhere in particular,’ he proposed to Hazel, and she pondered, ‘Why, yes, I suppose we COULD!’

Panting a little, very sweaty, observing that Fred’s ‘wind’ had not been improved by cigarettes, carrying extra sweaters and wishing they hadn’t, delighted at the convenience of stopping to see a view without having to find a parking place, they crawled, like two benevolent caterpillars gone vertical, up peaks from which they peered at the placid valley of the Housatonic, into orchards where early apples were afire in the long sweet grass, through pine groves which remembered old German fairy stories. On the multi-coloured stone flagging of the terrace at the King’s Arms, the grand hotel of the region, where Austrian counts, their Chicago countesses, and even proud Amherst and Williams students skied all winter, they lazily drank to each other, not to a nervous gang of Sachem citizens determined to be gay and like it.