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Updated: May 3, 2025
No doubt people go to those places yet, but Florindo and Lindora have not been to any of them for so many summers that they can hardly realize them as still open: for them they were closed in the earliest of the eighteen-seventies.
Now she understood, at least, why he never failed on Monday morning to wake in time for the stage to carry him to the station, and she said, No more farm-board for her if she knew it. In those idyllic days, while they were making their way, and counting the cost of every step as if it were the proverbial first step, the next step for Lindora was a large boarding-house for the summer.
Other men did it, and ran down once a month, or once a fortnight, to put things in shape, and then came back. Sleeping on a midnight view of her hard case, Lindora woke one morning with an inspiration; it might not be too much to call it a revelation. She wondered at herself, she was ashamed of herself, for not having thought of it before. Europe, of course, was the only solution.
Everybody on the piazza said it was very cheap, but to Lindora it was so dear that she decided for Florindo that they could not go on keeping the house open and the cook in it just for him, as the expressage on the wash took away all the saving in that. If she allowed him to sleep in the house, he could pick up his meals for much less than they now cost.
Florindo and Lindora are a married pair, still comparatively happy after forty years of wedded life, who have spent the part or the whole of each hot season out of town, sometimes in the hills, sometimes by the sea, sometimes in Europe. Their acquaintance with either form of sojourn, if not exhaustive, is so comprehensive that it might be cited as encyclopædic.
It was, therefore, in the interest of clearly ascertained economy that Lindora took her brood with her to a White Mountain hotel, where she made a merit of getting board for seventeen dollars and a half a week, when so many were paying twenty and twenty-five. Florindo came up twice during the summer, and stayed a fortnight each time, and fished, and said that it had been a complete rest.
A series of seasons followed when the married pair did not know where to go, in the person of the partner who represented them, and they had each spring a controversy vividly resembling a quarrel, but which was really not a quarrel, because the Dear knew that if it were not for the children Lindora would only be too glad never to leave their own house winter or summer, but just to stick there, year out and year in.
Lindora knew where not to spend it, but her wisdom ended there, and when a friend who was going to Europe offered them her furnished cottage at a merely nominal rent, Lindora took it because she could not think of anything else. They all found it so charming that after that summer she never would think again of hotels or any manner of boarding.
It would not be so bad, if one could live in them simply, as Lindora proposed doing when she made Florindo buy hers for her, but the graces of life cannot be had for nothing, or anything like nothing, and when you have a charming cottage, and are living on city terms in it, you have the wish to have people see you doing it.
They hired cottages, at rents not so nominal as at first, but not so very extravagant if you had not to keep the city rent going, too; and it finally seemed best to buy a cottage, and stop the leak of the rent, however small it was. Lindora did not count the interest on the purchase-money, or the taxes, or the repairs, or the winter care-taking.
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