Early in June Edith went down to their rented cottage on the south Long
Island shore. In her delicate health the doctor had recommended the
seaside, and this locality as quiet and restful, and not too far from the
whirl of the city. The place had a charm of its own, the charm, namely,
of a wide sky, illimitable, flashing, changing sea, rolling in from the
far tropical South with its message of romance to the barren Northern
shore, and the pure sand dunes, the product of the whippings of tempests
and wild weather. The cottage was in fact an old farmhouse, not an
impertinent, gay, painted piece of architecture set on the sand like a
tent for a month, but a solid, ugly, fascinating habitation, with barns
and outhouses, and shrubs, and an old garden--a place with a salty air
friendly to delicate spring blossoms and summer fruits and foliage.
If it was a farmhouse, the sea was an important part of the farm, and the
low-ceiled rooms suggested cabins; it required little imagination to
fancy that an East-Indian ship had some time come ashore and settled in
the sand, that it had been remodeled and roofed over, and its sides
pierced with casement windows, over which roses had climbed in order to
bind the wanderer to the soil.
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