She as industriously sent him nice, polite little notes of thanks.
In the meantime, alternating with his marsh pulp wrangles, he worked like a Trojan at the athletic graces he should have cultivated in his younger days.

He rode every morning; he practised every day at tennis and croquet; every evening he bowled; and every time some one sat at the piano and played dance music and the young people fell into impromptu waltzes and two-steps on the porch, he joined them and danced religiously with whomsoever he found to hand; usually Miss Hastings or Miss Westlake.
The latter ingenious young lady, during this while, continued to adore business, and with increasing fervor every day, and regretted, quite aloud, that she had never paid sufficient attention to this absorbing amusement, out of which all the men, that is, those who were really strong and purposeful, seem to derive so much satisfaction! On the following Monday at Bald Hill, when Hollis Creek and Meadow Brook fraternized together, in the annual union picnic, she found occasion for the most direct tete-a-tete of all anent commercial matters.
Under Bald Hill were any number of charming natural retreats, jumbles of Titanically toy-strewn, clean, bare rocks, screened here and there by tangles of young scrub oak and pine which grew apparently on bare stone surfaces and out of infinitesimal chinks and crannies, in utter defiance of all natural law.

Go where you would on that day, there were couples in each of the rock shelters; young couples, engaged in that fascinating pastime of finding out all they could about each other, and wondering about each other, and revealing themselves to each other as much as they cared to do, and flirting; oh, in a perfectly respectable sort of a way, you know; legitimate and commendable flirting; the sort of flirting which is only experimental and necessary, and which may cease at any moment to become mere airy trifling, and turn into something intensely and desperately serious, having a vital bearing upon the entire future lives of people; and there were deeply solemn moments, in spite of all the surface hilarity and gaiety, in many of these little out of way nooks kindly provided by beneficent nature for this identical purpose.
In one of these nooks, a curious sort of doll's amphitheatre, partly screened by dwarf cedars, were Miss Westlake and Mr.Turner, and Sam could not tell you to this day how she had roped him out of the herd, and isolated him, and brought him there.
"Business is just perfectly fascinating," she was saying.

"I've been talking a lot to papa about it here lately.

He thinks a great deal of you, by the way." "He does," Sam grunted in non-committal acknowledgment, with the sharp reflection that he had better look out for himself if that were the case, since the most of Westlake's old friends were bankrupt, he being the best business man of them all.
"Yes; he says you have an excellent business proposition, too, in your new Marsh Pulp Company." She said marsh pulp without an instant's hesitation.
"I think it's good myself," agreed Sam; "that is, if I can keep hold of it." Inwardly he added, "And if I can keep old Westlake's clutches off." She laughed lightly.
"Papa mentioned that very thing," she informed him.