Being a trained cuisinier, Myron was struck by the excellence and originality of the picnic lunch provided by Effie May. It consisted of ham and cheese sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs wrapped in waxed paper, coco-nut layer-cake, rather squashed, and coffee in a thermos bottle.
They had tramped three miles out of town, to Elm Hill, on the shore of Lake Nekobee. The hillside was thick with spruce and birch groves and a few elms, broken by pasture and meadow, and the lake, some two miles wide, was very clear, with sandy bottom, no marshy shores, and wooded hills or rolling farms all round it. There were a few flimsy summer cottages at one end, near the hamlet of East Black Rock, with its general store and two churches, but for the most part Lake Nekobee had not, in this day before the flood of motor cars, been popularly discovered.
'Say, this is it!' Myron cried suddenly when, full of hard-boiled egg and contentment, they lolled on a hot boulder above the lake, and Effie May smoked a cigarette with (it was A.D. 1911) extensive coughing and a gleeful feeling of sin.
'What is what?' demanded Effie May.
'This is just the place for my resort hotel. Nice hills, lovely clean lake, quiet, only three miles from the depot in town, and a hundred and twenty from New York.'
'Are you thinking about a resort hotel?'
'Well, sort of.' Humbly Myron spoke of his epic. 'Some day I'd like to build the best country inn in America--real out-door place, kind of simple, and yet as good grub and service and beds as the Plaza. You see--oh, really take some pains, put some thought into it, profit by all the other fellows' mistakes, and make it a corker. Do you think that would be fun?'
'Oh yes, I think it would be lots of fun. That would be--it would be won'erful!' said Effie May.
And so, the lady having approved his armour, his lance, and the general sensibleness of the whole expedition, the knight was ready to ride out with no more misgivings about his ability to bring back the Holy Grail.
The building of even a few shore cottages along Lake Nekobee had raised land-prices and when, six months later, after thinking it all over a few hundred times, Myron bought the Elm Hill property bordering on the lake, it cost him ten thousand dollars for one hundred acres--two thousand down, and two thousand a year. Before he had finished paying for it the land was worth two hundred an acre.
From the Note-Book of a Poet:
Arcade rite thru 6-8 blocks midtown NY, like the one you read of in Milan, Italy, (galleria or whatever it is?) just foot traffic, no vehicles, cafe tables, theatres, expens shops, gt gathering place noon and cocktail hr, heated in winter, pavement marble, 3-4 stories high, very handsome. Run N & S, middle of long blocks. Flowers. Also fountains?
T. J. Dingle was in his early thirties, but he was the president of the Black Thread National Bank. His grandfather, a farmer, a tobacco-grower from the Connecticut Valley, had started the first large dairy near Black Thread, and been founder of the public library. His father, also president of the First National but dead now a year, had been an upstanding, grey-moustached old gentleman, and he had been the first man whom Myron had ever seen riding a horse just for pleasure--the picture of a general on his tall bay. No Dingle in known history had worn a chin whisker or an icy eye, or foreclosed a mortgage if he could help it, or been suspected of exceeding the legal rate of interest by tacking on 'inspection fees', or shown any of the other interesting traits common to country bankers in fiction, and sometimes in real life.
T. J. Dingle himself was slim, eager but restrained, with a face out of which all the slackness and fat had been carved. He was the squire of Black Thread, and Myron remembered that the young Julia had been flattered when Ted Dingle had occasionally joined her side-porch court.
And if the Lambkins (aside from Effie May) had been inclined to believe Myron's assertion that he was only a small valve in the Elphinstone engine--as doubtless they would have, as soon as they got used to the sight of him--they would have been kept respectful by viewing the new friendship of Myron and T. J. Dingle.
When Myron went into the bank to cash a cheque, the third day of his visit, Dingle insisted on his coming into the private office, struggled a little with remarks about the weather, and abruptly invited him to dinner--his the only house in Black Thread that had the affectation of evening dinner.
Myron found that the dolorous old green and brown Dingle Mansion, with its high cupola, had been made almost tolerable with white paint and the removal of the scrollwork above the porch; the gloomy rooms had been brightened, and filled with books and flowers. Dingle's young wife, from New Haven, was given to gay sprigged house-dresses, playing the piano, and making Lobster Newburgh, all excellent habits. Sitting with them, in the first easy household he had found in Black Thread, Myron realized that T. J. Dingle was at once shrewder and more cultivated than anyone he had met since he had left home--except perhaps the supercilious Carlos Jaynes of the Elphinstone organization, who managed to combine Pan Dandy Lunch Rooms and dislike of Myron with devotion to Brahms and El Greco.
It seemed to Myron a little strange that his two intimates in his boyhood town should not have been his own family, nor Herbert Lambkin, nor any of the lively ruffians with whom he had once loafed at the livery-stable, but two familiar strangers whom, as the baby Effie May and the aloof Ted Dingle, he had seen without knowing them.
And it came to pass that at least one evening a week, while the Maison Lambkin fluttered more and more unctuously, Myron and Effie May spent with the Dingles, and had thus a social recognition and fixation without which their shy affection might not have crystallized into marriage.
He never did propose. It is, indeed, doubtful whether anybody in history, outside of novels, ever has really 'proposed'. They simply came to know that they liked each other and excited each other, and that, presumably, they were going to be married.
They were walking by the river in that last light of an early summer afternoon when the trees stand up like pyramids of green light and the world is content to slumber.
He held her hand to his breast, stroking it, and trembled, 'I guess--it kind of looks--it looks as if we'd be married. Let's be married in a fortnight, and run off to Canada or Maine or some place, before I have to get back to work. . . . We'll have a lovely suite in the Westward, and I'll make Mark redecorate the bathroom with marble floor and coloured tiles and a shower, besides the tub.'
'A suite? That would be awfully exciting. It would be--oh, in a big New York hotel like that--it would be perfectly won'erful!' said Effie May.
And so Myron did have to send hastily to New York for his morning coat and striped trousers and four-in-hand and have Luciano Mora take a chance on getting him a silk hat of the right size--his first silk hat, and he wore it to theatres four times the first year, twice the second year, never at all afterward.
They were married at the Presbyterian Church with (to Myron's mild astonishment) bridesmaids, flower-girls, Ora as best man, and T. J. Dingle, Luciano Mora, and Herbert Lambkin as ushers.
Julia had a perfectly won'erful time weeping, and informing the world that she had to be mother to 'poor little Effens', and Myron had never so loved Effie as when he overheard her snarling to Julia, 'Oh, for God's sake cut out the mothering and find my darn garters!'