He laughed too at this tribute to his summer coating of bronze over red. "I feel pretty fit," he admitted.
"My summer always has that effect," she went on. "Do you know that for all I've been so much out of the active world"--a shadow fell on her eyes,--"I long for country and farms? How I wish I could live always out-of-doors! The day might come--" the shadow lifted a little--"when I'd retire to a farm for good."
"You've one of those constitutions which require air and light and sunshine," he answered.
"You're quite right. I actually bleach in the shadow--like lettuce. That's why Aunt Paula always sends me away for a month every now and then to the quietest place proper for a well-brought-up young person."
His eyes shadowed as though they had caught that blasting shade in hers. From gossip about the Mountain House, later from her own admission, he knew who "Aunt Paula" was--"a spirit medium, or something," said the gossip; "a great teacher of a new philosophy," said Annette Markham.
Dr. Blake, partly because adventure had kept him over-young, held still his basic, youthful ideas about the proper environment for woman. Whenever the name "Aunt Paula," softened with the accents of affection, proceeded from that low, contralto voice, it hurt the new thing, greater than any conventional idea, which was growing up in him. He even suspected, at such times, what might be the "something nobler than nursing."
A big apple tree shaded the sidelines of the Mountain House tennis court. A bench fringed its trunk. Annette threw herself down, back against the bark. It was late afternoon. The other house-guests droned over bridge on the piazzas or walked in the far woods; they were alone out-of-doors. And Annette, always, until now, so chary of confidences, developed the true patient's weakness and began to talk symptoms.
"It is curious the state I'm in before Aunt Paula sends me away," she said; "I was a nervous child, and though I've outgrown it, I still have attacks of nerve fag or something like it. I can feel them coming on and so can she. You know we've been together so much that it's like--like two bees in adjoining cells. The cell-wall has worn thin; we can almost touch. She knows it often before I do. She makes me go to bed early; often she puts me to sleep holding my hand, as she used to do when I was a little girl. But even sleep doesn't much help. I come out of it with a kind of fright and heaviness. I have little memories of curious dreams and a queer sense, too, that I mustn't remember what I've dreamed. I grow tired and heavy--I can always see it in my face. Then Aunt Paula sends me away, and I become all right again--as I am now."