252
PARTISAN REVIEW
thing to me but I did not hear her and I ran on, flinging back, with
no thought of its meaning, "I know it!"
We did not live far from the Hotel, perhaps no more than a
quarter of a mile, but because after the cluster of fishermen's cot–
tages there were no houses at all on either side of the curving white
road, it seemed a long and tedious distance. Here there were no shade
trees to interrupt the glare of the sand and the dry flowers that
straggled half-heartedly along the road were too dwarfed even to cast
a shadow. It was a relief to take a turning and then, from a slight rise,
to see the big white frame Hotel with its bright flower beds and its
verandas where hung baskets of fern and ivy.
The Hotel Barstow was the sort of place which never changes
and then, with very age, it falls and the site
is
used for a new
structure. Such a day was impossible to imagine. Anyone who had
lived there assumed that the stuffed hoot-owls and the Wilson snipes
and the· herons would go on forever patiently standing on one leg in
hoary moss or placidly sitting on unseen eggs behind their glass cases
in the dining room, that until the end of time the same old ladies,
musty-smelling and enfeebled, would be offered cream-of-wheat as
the first entree on the evening menu. Forever, too, the same sort of
pert, plump man would stand behind the curved desk in the lobby,
fetching down keys and mail and inquiring after his guests' health.
Miss Pride, an early riser, was drilling on the beach, unwithered
in spite of the sun which was already very warm. The clerk, Mr.
Hagethorn, called from the veranda, "vVell, Miss Pride, is it hot
enough for you today?"
Unsmilingly she replied, "I observe no change from yesterday.
Has the mercury risen?" Even in midsummer, she always wore black
broadcloth suits and an olive beaver hat. She apparently suffered
neither from the heat nor from the cold, for she did not shiver or
perspire, and she was never heard to discuss the temperature.
I slackened my pace in order to hold her in my vision: straight as
a gun-barrel, she carried her lengthy shadow up and down the golden
sand; or she rested it, squarely facing Boston, looking with her for–
midable eyes into the very conscience of her care-taker who was prob–
ably loafing on the job. I had heard someone say of my mother,
"She is beautiful except in one thing, her eyes are too large." I
be–
lieved, therefore, that Miss Pride wa'> beautiful for hers were very
small. They were eyes more like a bird's than any other creature's:
that is, such was their intensity and their sharp change of direction
(they never wandered, but rather disconnected their focus from one
point of concentration and abruptly fixed it upon the next) that they
