After Sunday dinner Carmelita declined an invitation to waste the perfectly delightful afternoon by playing bridge and instead joined Rao-Singh and the crowd that was going swimming. In her sleek California bathing suit she was a very striking figure but she enjoyed swimming as exercise rather than as a fashion show and it took the broad-shouldered Rao-Singh, as they sat legs dangling on the side of the Hodge raft, to tell her how beautiful she looked.
"Are you enjoying America?" she asked, ignoring his compliment and descending upon safer and more impersonal ground.
"Very much. And you?"
"Oh, I am a thorough American now," she cried.
"I don't know about that," he gazed at her calculatingly. "You are too full of dash and color and too much in love with life ever to be what they call here a 'one hundred per cent. American.' Americans of your age are in love only with money. They do not fall in love with life until they have made their money and are old and it is too late. It is so foolish. One must be young to really live.
To-day of past Regrets and Future Fears:
To-morrow!—Why, To-morrow I may be
Myself with Yesterday's Sev'n Thousand Years.'"
