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So Sally used my knees for the moment, and I explained the idea to her briefly, and some other things at greater length; and then we both laughed and prayed aloud for plausible weather.

But it was months coming.

II

Think, if you can, of a whole winter passing in Westchester County without its storming one or more times on any single solitary Saturday or Sunday or holiday! Christmas Day, even, some of the men played tennis out-of-doors. The balls were cold and didn’t bounce very high, and all the men who played wanted to sit in the bar and talk stocks, but otherwise it made a pretty good game. Often, because our guests were so disagreeable about the money they had lost or were losing, we decided not to give any more parties, but when we thought that fresh air was good for our friends, whether they liked it or not, of course we had to keep on asking them. And, besides, we were very much set on the idea that I have referred to, and there was always a chance of plausible weather.

It did not come till May. But then it “came good,” as Sally said. It “came good” and it came opportunely. Everything was right. We had the right guests; we had the right situation in Wall Street, and the weather was right. It came out of the north-east, darkly blowing (this was Saturday, just after the usual motor-boat load and their afternoon editions had been landed), and at first it made the Sound, and even the sheltered narrows between the island and the main-land, look pancake-flat and oily. Then it turned the Sound into a kind of incoming gray, striped with white; and then into clean white, wonderfully bright and staring under the dark clouds. I never saw a finer storm come up finer. But nobody would go out to the point to see it come. The Stock Exchange had closed on the verge of panic (that was its chronic Saturday closing last winter) and you couldn’t get the men or women away from the thought of what might happen Monday. “Good heavens,” said Billoo, “think of poor Sharply on his way home from Europe! Can’t get to Wall Street before Wednesday, and God knows what he’ll find when he gets there.”

“What good would it do him to get there before?” I asked. “Wouldn’t he sail right in and do the wrong thing, just as everybody has done all winter?”

“You don’t understand, Sam,” said Billoo, very lugubriously; and then he annihilated me by banging his fist on a table and saying, “At least he’d be on the spot, wouldn’t he?“

“Oh,” I said, “if you put it that way, I admit that that’s just where he would be. Will anybody come and have a look at the fine young storm that I’m having served?”

“Not now, Sam–not now,” said Billoo, as if the storm would always stay just where, and as, it was; and nobody else said anything. The men wanted to shout and get angry and make dismal prophecies, and the women wanted to stay and hear them, and egg them on, and decide what they would buy or sell on Monday.

“All right, Billoo-on-the-spot,” I said. “Sally–?”

Sally was glad to come. And first we went out on the point and had a good look at the storm. The waves at our feet were breaking big and wild, the wind was groaning and howling as if it had a mortal stomach-ache, and about a mile out was a kind of thick curtain of perpendicular lines, with dark, squally shadows at its base.

“Sam!” cried Sally, “it’s snow–snow,” and she began to jump up and down.

In a minute or two flakes began to hit us wet slaps in the face, and we took hands and danced, and then ran (there must have been something intoxicating about that storm) all the way to the pier. And there was the captain of the motor-boat just stepping ashore.