"Your sister and I ride as usual and continue to improve the breeds of the various domestic creatures in which we are interested and you are not.
"The pheasants are doing well this year, and we're beginning to turn them out with their foster-mothers.
"Your father wishes me to tell you and Jim Westmore that the trout fishing is still fairly good, although it was better, of course, in May and June.
"The usual parties and social amenities continue in Northbrook. Everybody included in that colony seems to have arrived, also the usual influx of guests, and there is much entertaining, tennis, golf, dances--the invariable card always offered there.
"Claire and I go enough to keep from being too completely forgotten. Your father seldom bothers himself.
"Also, the war in Europe has made us, at Foreland, disinclined to frivolity. Others, too, of the older society in Northbrook are more subdued than usual, devote themselves to quieter pursuits. And those among us who have sons of military age are prone to take life soberly in these strange, oppressive days when even under sunny skies in this land aloof from war, all are conscious of the tension, the vague foreboding, the brooding stillness that sometimes heralds storms.
"But all north-country folk do not feel this way. The Gerhardts, for example, are very gay with a house full of guests and overflowing week-ends. The German Embassy, as always, is well represented at Hohenlinden. Your father won't go there at all now. As for Claire and myself, we await political ruptures before we indulge in social ones. And it doesn't look like war, now that Von Tirpitz has been sent to Coventry.
"This, Garry darling, is my budget of news. Bring your guests whenever you please. You wouldn't bring anybody you oughtn't to; your family is liberal, informal, pleasantly indifferent, and always delightfully busy with its individual manias and fads; so come as soon as you please--sooner, please--because, strange as it may seem, your mother would like to see you."
The letter was what he had expected. But, as always, it made him very grateful.
"Wonderful mother I have," he murmured, opening another letter from his father:
"Why the devil don't you come up? You've missed the cream of the fishing. There's nothing doing in the streams now, but at sunrise and toward evening they're breaking nicely in the lake.