How does one fend off the influence of a summer day? You start by serving tea at three in the afternoon. Then, having thanked the Lord for His bounty and passed the biscuits, you talk about relatives long since dead. You dredge up some story you’ve dredged up before. And when the conversation flags, rather than adjourn into the waning wonder of the vernal afternoon, you pick up a magazine. For Aunt Polly, this was preferably a Saturday Evening Post she had already read before. Turning through the pages, she would occasionally stop at a photograph—say, of a short-haired Amelia Earhart preparing
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