The following winter, with its blizzards, ice and slush, seemed interminable. Paul read, and made music, oppressed by a sense of his dilettantism. It was maddening to be a mere fly on the cake of life—but even worse, he mused, to be a real currant, embedded in its dough. During the long transition weeks, when partial thaws alternated with frosts, when bleak winds and icy rains tore at the trees and fields in a final effort to frustrate the revival of life, Paul's isolation was relieved by conferences with old Dave Ashmill, who, in response to the increasing clamour for ships, had formed a syndicate to take over disused yards and, with lumber from his own mills, build wooden vessels on government contract. Paul had agreed to sell his waterside properties, and accepted the post of secretary of the Hale's Turning yard.
There were many papers to prepare and arrangements to make for the installation of plant and procuring of supplies. Old Ashmill, like his son, cultivated a coarse heartiness which resembled broad-mindedness, and chuckled whenever Paul gave vent to subversive remarks of the sort which had stamped him, in the eyes of Hale's Turning, as an "atheist"—the most damning epithet in its bestowal—or "odd," the epithet that had attached to Miss Windell.
Mrs. Ashmill, who was prepared to receive him coldly, owing to his reputation, he had won over in one stroke by arriving at her house in a dinner jacket and addressing the parlour-maid as though she were a maid rather than a "hired girl." Flora Ashmill, a virgin of forty and quite the most genteel object in the country, was deliciously appalled by his authoritative manner of contradicting her on her best topics: painting, music, horticulture.
Regarding his resistance the two women maintained a pregnant silence, making their knitting needles click with
