"I like teaching girls," she answered with a quick inspiration.
He drove his unwilling intelligence to take in this incredible
statement.
"Girls," he said, opening his honest blue eyes and wrinkling his
forehead. "Why girls?"
"They're so much cleverer than boys."
She tossed it off as if were a well-known and generally admitted fact.
He was gentle with her.
"People think just the opposite," he said.
"Men do."
"I think you're wrong about that, really," Durland said. "I think
anyone--even a very just man like Uncle Anthony--would say that women
can't think, at least not like men."
"Would he, indeed?" said Pearl. "Well, I don't know him; but he may be
the kind of man who prefers inferior people of both sexes."
Durland, unable to believe she really thought this, looked wistfully
into her face for a sign of relenting.
"Of course," he said, "you are very unusual. You must not judge other
women by yourself."
"I was fifteenth in my class," said Pearl. "Quite stupid compared to
the others; but even I never had any trouble with algebra. I put my
mind on it. That's the trouble with boys--they're so scattered."
This was cruel, considering who had scattered him; but like many
cruelties it worked.
As the hour finished, Dolly came downstairs and said, without looking
at anyone, that she herself was going immediately in the motor to
Shinnecock for her golf lesson and could not delay an instant; but if
Antonia were there and ready there was no objection to dropping her
and Miss Exeter at the public beach. At that moment Antonia, who, just
as her mother had suggested, had been crabbing since dawn, appeared
on the lawn, streaked with seaweed and exuding a faintly ancient and
fishy smell. Dolly was like steel and would not allow her a moment for
changing; and so, dropping her crabs and nets on the piazza, Antonia
with Miss Exeter got into the car after Dolly, and were duly dropped at
the little group of dark-red bathing houses that formed the entrance to
the public beach.
Pearl found the child, in spite of her personal untidiness, a most
agreeable companion. She had read widely and with imagination. She
knew a great deal of poetry--rather martial poetry--by heart; all of
Horatius, for instance, which she said she usually recited to herself
in the dentist's chair and from which she gained comfort.
They were walking up the wide steps to the bathing house as she spoke,
and she stopped and bent down to examine a boy's bicycle--she was a
connoisseur of bicycles.
They came in sight of the beach now--all set out with bright-colored
umbrellas like gay poisonous mushrooms. It was the hour when the beach
was given over to children.
Pearl was thinking that it looked very pretty, when once again she
heard Antonia's clarion voice break out at her elbow.
"Hi, there, you kids! Leave that fort alone! It's mine!"
She darted down the narrow boardwalk toward an immense hole in the
sand, scattering a band of neatly dressed children, much as the
effete Romans were scattered by the first onslaught of the northern
barbarians. Pearl could not help laughing as she saw children run
to their governesses or snatched back by their nurses; but the next
moment she was sorry, for she saw that it was being said in various
tongues that Antonia was quite the worst brought-up child in the world.
Pearl was nothing if not a partisan, and she was already completely on
Antonia's side.
She and Antonia were supposed to bathe early so as to leave the two
Conway bathhouses free for Mrs. Conway and Dolly when they appeared at
a later and more fashionable hour. "Everything in our family is done
for Dolly," said Antonia when she was finally dragged out of the water.
"It makes me tired the way mother indulges every whim of hers."
Rebellious or not, however, Antonia was dressed--as much dressed as
she ever was, which was about three-quarters as much as other little
girls--by half after twelve.
She and Pearl went back to the beach and sat down under the
red-and-black-striped umbrella which the life-saving man had stuck in
the sand for them as if he were about to do a pole vault with it. And
presently Durland, ready for his swim, came and plopped down beside
them, and immediately a girl in a one-piece tomato-colored bathing
dress rose from another part of the beach and came and sat on the other
side of him.
Antonia, with a thin brown arm, still smelling very slightly of
crabs in spite of her swim, clasped about Pearl's neck, blew in her
governess' ear the information that this was Caroline Temple, Durland's
best girl. Like so many courtships, this one, to the outside world,
seemed to be carried on principally by the lady. She neither looked at
nor spoke to Pearl and Antonia.