“I came over to get you to go to the electrician’s with me, Godfrey, but I won’t make you. Scott wants you to run out to the lake, and it’s such a fine day, you really should go.”
“Car’s outside. We’ll just drop Lillian at the house, Doctor, and you can pick up your bathing-suit. We heard part of your lecture, by the way. How you get by the Methodists is still a mystery to me.
“I wish he would get into trouble, Scott,” said Lillian as they left the building. “I wish he wouldn’t talk to those fat-faced boys as if they were intelligent beings. You cheapen yourself, Godfrey. It makes me a little ashamed.”
“I was rather rambling on today. I’m sorry you happened along. There’s a fellow in that lot, Tod Miller, who isn’t slow, and he excites me to controversy.”
“All the same,” murmured his wife, “it’s hardly dignified to think aloud in such company. It’s in rather bad taste.”
“Thank you for the tip, Lillian. I won’t do it again.”
It took Scott only twenty minutes to get out to the lake. He drew up at the bit of beach St. Peter had bought for himself years before; a little triangle of sand running out into the water, with a bathhouse and seven shaggy pine-trees on it. Scott had to fuss with the car, and the Professor was undressed and in the water before him.
When McGregor was ready to go in, his father-in-law was some distance out, swimming with an overarm stroke, his head and shoulders well out of the water. He wore on his head a rubber visor of a kind he always brought home from France in great numbers. This one was vermilion, and was like a continuation of his flesh—his arms and back were burned a deep terra-cotta from a summer in the lake. His head and powerful