I resented it. No wonder it was easy for him. “Great mistake,” said Poppleton. “Too soft. Look at this”—here he picked up a big stone and began pounding at the gate-post—“see how easily it chips! Smashes right off. Look at that, the whole corner knocks right off, see!”

Beverly-Jones entered no protest. I began to see that there is a sort of understanding, a kind of freemasonry, among men who have summer places. One shows his things; the other runs them down, and smashes them. This makes the whole thing easy at once. Beverly-Jones showed his lawn.

“Your turf is all wrong, old boy,” said Poppleton. “Look! It has no body to it. See, I can kick holes in it with my heel. Look at that, and that! If I had on stronger boots I could kick this lawn all to pieces.”

“These geraniums along the border,” said Beverly-Jones, “are rather an experiment. They’re Dutch.”

“But my dear fellow,” said Poppleton, “you’ve got them set in wrongly. They ought to slope from the sun you know, never to it. Wait a bit”—here he picked up a spade that was lying where a gardener had been working—“I’ll throw a few out. Notice how easily they come up. Ah, that fellow broke! They’re apt to. There, I won’t bother to reset them, but tell your man to slope them over from the sun. That’s the idea.”

Beverly-Jones showed his new boathouse next and Poppleton knocked a hole in the side with a hammer to show that the lumber was too thin.

“If that were my boathouse,” he said, “I’d rip the outside clean off it and use shingle and stucco.”

It was, I noticed, Poppleton’s plan first to imagine Beverly-Jones’s things his own, and then to smash them, and then give them back smashed to Beverly-Jones. This seemed to please them both. Apparently it is a well-understood method of entertaining a guest and being entertained. Beverly-Jones and Poppleton, after an hour or so of it, were delighted with one another.

Yet somehow, when I tried it myself, it failed to work.

“Do you know what I would do with that cedar summer-house if it was mine?” I asked my host the next day.

“No,” he said.

“I’d knock the thing down and burn it,” I answered.

But I think I must have said it too fiercely. Beverly-Jones looked hurt and said nothing.

Not that these people are not doing all they can for me. I know that. I admit it. If I should meet my end here and if—to put the thing straight out—my lifeless body is found floating on the surface of this pond, I should like there to be documentary evidence of that much. They are trying their best. “This is Liberty Hall,” Mrs. Beverly-Jones said to me on the first day of my visit.