The weeks spent at the summer hotels with Aunt Augusta had all been periods of torture. "Why don't you go off with the young folks?" Aunt Augusta would ask. "I don't see! It beats me! Here you are down here, in this expensive place, and all you do is to hide around alone among the rocks, and sit on the piazza, and sew, and rock! My grief, you're the queerest I ever saw! Why don't you join in and have a nice time?"
"Why don't I join in and have a nice time with the sea-gulls?" Reba wanted to reply, but she never "talked back" to Aunt Augusta. "Oh, I don't care about it," was all she would ever say.
The truth was that the young people at the summer-resorts Reba visited were creatures of a different breed from her. They made different motions, uttered different sounds; they could laugh and joke banter; they could play tennis and golf; they could dance, swim. Miss Billings had taught Reba none of these.
"But my lands," Aunt Augusta had argued once. "You don't have to swim, to go in bathing, do you? You haven't had on your bathing-suit but just once, and after all the pains we took!"
The thought of that "just once" had made Reba blush with shame as she recalled it. One of the young people in the group, which Aunt Augusta wanted Reba to join, had smiled and whispered, "Look!" to a tanned, half-naked young man beside her, when Reba first timidly appeared on the beach in the bathing-suit modeled by Aunt Augusta and Aunt Emma and her mother in the first floor bedroom at home.
They hadn't been able to get a pattern for a bathing-suit in Ridgefield, and they had guessed all wrong.
