Any other girl
would have done as well. A slight relief, but a welcome.
Another mitigation: the house, the room, was full of people. The other
young women of the household were present; even the young business-man who
had understood the stove and the pump had looked in: no chance for an
intense, segregated appreciation. There had been another weekend at the
dunes, when this youth had nimbly ranged the forest and the beach to find
wood for the great open fireplace; and he had come, now, at the end of the
season, to make due acknowledgments for privileges enjoyed. He, for his
part, was willing enough to regard Amy as a heroine; but he considered her
as a heroine linked with the wrong man and operative in the wrong place. He
cared nothing in the world for Cope, and disparaged him as before--when he
did not ignore him altogether. If Amy had but been rescued by him, George
F. Pearson, instead of by this Bertram Cope, and if she had been snatched
from a disorderly set of breakers at the foot of those disheveled sandhills
instead of from the prim, prosy, domestic edge of Churchton--well, wouldn't
the affair have been better set and better carried off? In such case it
might have been picturesque and heroic, instead of slightly silly.
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