Beneath its shade Lucy sits and reads or embroiders or answers her constantly increasing correspondence.
The porch serves too as a reception-room, the vines being thick and the occupants completely hidden from view.

Here Lucy often spreads a small table, especially when Max Feilding drives over in his London drag from Beach Haven on Barnegat beach.

On these occasions, if the weather is warm, she refreshes him with delicate sandwiches and some of her late father's rare Scotch whiskey (shelved in the cellar for thirty years) or with the more common brands of cognac served in the old family decanters.
Of late Max had become a constant visitor.

His own ancestors had made honorable records in the preceding century, and were friends of the earlier Cobdens during the Revolution.

This, together with the fact that he had visited Yardley when Lucy was a girl--on his first return from Paris, in fact--and that the acquaintance had been kept up while he was a student abroad, was reason enough for his coming with such frequency.
His drag, moreover, as it whirled into Yardley's gate, gave a certain air of eclat to the Manor House that it had not known since the days of the old colonel.