For a number of hours, on the train to Terry Wickett's vacation place in the Vermont hills, Martin was convinced that he loved Joyce Lanyon, and that he was going to attack the art of being amusing as he had attacked physical chemistry. Ardently, and quite humorlessly, as he sat stiffly in a stale Pullman chair-car with his feet up on his suit-case, he pictured himself wearing a club-tie (presumably first acquiring the tie and the club), playing golf in plus-fours, and being entertaining about dear old R. G. and incredibly witty about dear old Latham Ireland's aged Rolls-Royce.
But these ambitions he forgot as he came to Terry's proud proprietary shanty, by a lake among oaks and maples, and heard Terry's real theories of the decomposition of quinine derivatives.
Being perhaps the least sentimental of human beings, Terry had named his place "Birdies' Rest." He owned five acres of woodland, two miles from a railroad station. His shanty was a two-room affair of logs, with bunks for beds and oilcloth for table-linen.
"Here's the layout, Slim," said Terry. 'Some day I'm going to figure out a way of making a lab here pay, by manufacturing sera or something, and I'll put up a couple more buildings on the flat by the lake, and have one absolutely independent place for science—two hours a day on the commercial end, and say about six for sleeping and a couple for feeding and telling dirty stories. That leaves—two and six and two make ten, if I'm any authority on higher math—that leaves fourteen hours a day for research (except when you got something special on), with no Director and no Society patrons and no Trustees that you've got to satisfy by making fool reports. Of course there won't be any scientific dinners with ladies in candy-box dresses, but I figure we'll be able to afford plenty of salt pork and corncob pipes, and your bed will be made perfectly—if you make it yourself. Huh? Lez go and have a swim."
Martin returned to New York with the not very compatible plans of being the best-dressed golfer in Greenwich and of cooking beef-stew with Terry at Birdies' Rest.
But the first of these was the more novel to him.
