When my cousin Hortensia asked me one evening in the middle of the winter to go with her the following week to look at a "summer place" for her on the Maine coast, it crossed my mind for a moment that she was slightly mad; but the glance that I gave her as she sat in her rocking-chair, just out of the tempered light of the reading-lamp, with her dainty gray skirts spread about her and the firelight flickering on her calm features and white hands as she plied her needlework, showed nothing to warrant my suspicion.