unusually brisk fishing or bathing season, and then left to luck—which had subsided. Half of them were empty, most were untidy, and one and all were dingy, with grey tin roofs, and weatherboards that pleaded for the paint-pot in vain. The fence of one was made out of rusty kerosene-tin tops—unique but not beautiful; and none of the inhabitants seemed to have thought of planting trees or a garden. Tree-mallow was as far as they had got; there were a few mallows sprawling here and there, whose coarse growth seemed only to intensify the general dreariness.
Ted Nye had promised his mother, however, that he would make her a garden some day, and really would paint the house these very next Easter holidays; and it could not be denied that the Point was conveniently close to the cement-works where he was employed. Still, Mrs. Nye’s best comfort lay in the reflection that, as soon as ever he got a rise, she would coax him to remove. There were plenty of quite pretty places not so very far away—that valley, for example, at the entrance of which the car stopped on the way to town; there were trees there!
Mrs. Nye was a woman to whom beauty—only of a certain kind, it is true: not the beauty that is in the least difficult, or shy, or wild, but beauty perfectly defined and positive—made a strong appeal; how strong, she herself had had no idea, before she came to live in this place that lacked it so completely. Not that, even now, she could perhaps have named her need; but she felt it acutely, and this gentle autumn weather, by recalling its former satisfactions, had given it a terrible edge. Those
