Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/94

 getting ready for her annual visit to the Pearns in Lenox, and left before lunch. So I had several days in which to think my way through.

"The first thing I discovered was that Aldergrove without Rhoda is like food without salt. I was amazed to find that I had to exert myself merely to share the daily existence of the family. Mr. Marple and I are good friends. We haven't a single taste in common that I know of: he likes Mark Twain and golf and chess and President Coolidge, and they make me tired; but that doesn't keep us from liking each other. Yet with Rhoda gone I saw that it was she and she alone who had been creating the setting in which I had begun to feel so comfortable. She was my only reason for being in that setting at all. And it dawned on me, as it would have done long ago on anybody else, that I was being kept, pure and simple.

"From that moment on I put a lot of twos and twos together and got a lot of fours,—perhaps I got too many; if I'd only inherited my poor father's head for mathematics, instead of my poor mother's impressionistic noddle!

"Another trifling incident drew a line under the fours and faced me with the grand total. I had gone down to the beach to go for a row. John and Spikey Daggett were at work on some momentous nautical invention but came to give me a hand with the boat. When it was in the water they returned to the boathouse. From outside, as I took off my shoes and