"But the development they've begun down the road is the worst yet," Catherine Smith wrote in her letter to Ruth Greening, back home in Maryland. "I'm glad you can't see the Point now. Not much like the place you loved so when you visited me, all bayberries and wild roses and sweet fern! Now it's a cloud of dust—two bulldozers working night and day (or so it seems) on this new road they're pushing through. Fifteen houses, they're putting on it. No, units, that's what you say now, dear! And they look like units. Three stories high, with the main entrance on the second floor. They look as high as cliffs, and then an idiotic little overhang halfway up, as a kind of sop, I suppose, to old New England. If this continues at the present rate there won't be any old New England. Not what I call—"

Catherine broke off, stuck her ballpoint pen between her teeth, and stared across the charming little morning-room, into which sun flooded from the curved bow-window, let into the fabric of the old house, remodeled in her father's day. Beside her lay a pile of letters already written, with stamps affixed, on blue paper with the heading in dark blue. It was the very dye her father used in the days when this was his house and she was a blissful little girl with pail and shovel.

Now that she was long grown up, grandmother of six, she still followed his custom of attending to correspondence in the mornings. He always said, "If I don't answer these now it'll never get done! Once I leave this house I'm a goner." He meant swimming, blueberrying, going out in his motor launch the Cachalot—every time they went out in her he always announced, "The Cruise of the Cachalot!" Nowadays nobody