Publisher's Synopsis
LANSING threw the end of Strefford's expensive cigar into the lake, and bent over his wife. Poorchild! She had fallen asleep.... He leaned back and stared up again at the silver-flooded sky. Howqueer-how inexpressibly queer-it was to think that that light was shed by his honey-moon! A yearago, if anyone had predicted his risking such an adventure, he would have replied by asking to belocked up at the first symptoms....There was still no doubt in his mind that the adventure was a mad one. It was all very well forSusy to remind him twenty times a day that they had pulled it off-and so why should he worry?Even in the light of her far-seeing cleverness, and of his own present bliss, he knew the future wouldnot bear the examination of sober thought. And as he sat there in the summer moonlight, with herhead on his knee, he tried to recapitulate the successive steps that had landed them on Streffy's lakefront.On Lansing's side, no doubt, it dated back to his leaving Harvard with the large resolve not tomiss anything. There stood the evergreen Tree of Life, the Four Rivers flowing from its foot; and onevery one of the four currents he meant to launch his little skiff. On two of them he had not gonevery far, on the third he had nearly stuck in the mud; but the fourth had carried him to the veryheart of wonder. It was the stream of his lively imagination, of his inexhaustible interest in everyform of beauty and strangeness and folly. On this stream, sitting in the stout little craft of hispoverty, his insignificance and his independence, he had made some notable voyages.... And so, when Susy Branch, whom he had sought out through a New York season as the prettiest and mostamusing girl in sight, had surprised him with the contradictory revelation of her modern sense ofexpediency and her old-fashioned standard of good faith, he had felt an irresistible desire to put offon one more cruise into the unknown
