The Lady of Landor Lane

I

‘TAKE your choice; I have bungalows to burn,’ said the architect.

He and his ally, the real-estate man, had been unduly zealous in the planting of bungalows in the new addition beyond the college. About half of them remained unsold, and purchasers were elusive. A promised extension of the trolley line had not materialized; and half a dozen houses of the bungalow type, scattered along a ridge through which streets had been hacked in the most brutal fashion, spoke for the sanguine temper of the projectors of Sherwood Forest. The best thing about the new streets was their names, which were a testimony to the fastidious taste of a professor in the college who had frequently thundered in print against our ignoble American nomenclature.

It was hoped that Sherwood Forest would prove particularly attractive to newly married folk of cultivation who spoke the same social language. There must, therefore, be a Blackstone Road, as a lure for struggling lawyers, a Lister Avenue, to tickle the imagination of young physicians, and Midas Lane, in which the business man, sitting at his own hearthside far from the jarring city, might dream of golden harvests. To the young matron anxious to keep in touch with art and literature, what could have been more delightful than the thought of receiving her mail in Emerson Road, Longfellow Lane, Audubon Road, or any one of a dozen similar highways (if indeed the new streets might strictly be so called) almost within sound of the college bell? The college was a quarter of a mile away, and yet near enough to shed its light upon this new colony that had risen in a strip of forest primeval, which, as the promoting company’s circulars more or less accurately recited, was only thirty minutes from lobsters and head lettuce.

This was all a year ago, just as August haughtily relinquished the world to the sway of September. I held the chair of applied sociology in the college, and had taken a year off to write a number of articles for which I had long been gathering material. It had occurred to me that it would be worth while to write a series of sociological studies in the form of short stories. My plan was to cut small cross-sections in the social strata of the adjoining city, in the suburban village which embraced the college, and in the adjacent farm region, and attempt to portray, by a nice balancing of realism and romance, the lives of the people in the several groups I had been observing. I had talked to an editor about it and he had encouraged me to try my hand.

I felt enough confidence in the scheme to risk a year’s leave, and I now settled down to my writing zestfully. I had already submitted three stories, which had been accepted in a cordial spirit that proved highly stimulating to further endeavor; and the first of the series, called ‘The Lords of the Round House,’ — a sketch of the domestic relationships and social conditions of the people living near the railroad shops, — had been commented on favorably as a fresh and novel view of an old subject. My second study dealt with a settlement sustained by the canning industry, and under the title, ‘Eros and the Peach Crop,’I had described the labors and recreations of t his community honestly, and yet with a degree of humor.

As a bachelor professor I had been boarding near the college with the widow of a minister; but now that I was giving my time wholly to writing I found this domicile intolerable. My landlady, admirable woman though she was, was altogether too prone to knock at my door on trifling errands. When I had filled my notebook with memoranda for a sketch dealing with the boarding-house evil (it has lately appeared as ‘Charging What the Onion Will Bear’), I resolved to find lodgings elsewhere. And besides, the assistant professor of natural sciences occupied a room adjoining mine, and the visits of strange reptilia to my quarters were far from stimulating to literary labor.

I had long been immensely curious as to those young and trusting souls who wed in the twenties, establish homes, and unterrified by cruel laws enacted for the protection of confiding creditors, buy homes on the installment plan, keep a cow, carry life insurance, buy theatre tickets, maintain a baby, and fit as snugly into the social structure as though the world were made for them alone. In my tramps about the city I had marked with professional interest the appearance of great colonies of bungalows which had risen within a few years, and which spoke with an appealing eloquence for an obstinate confidence in the marriage tie. In my late afternoon excursions through these sprightly suburban regions I had gazed with the frankest admiration upon wholly charming young persons stepping blithely along new cement walks, equipped with the neatest of card-cases, or bearing embroidered bags of sewing; and maids in the smartest of caps opened doors to them. Through windows guarded by the whitest of draperies, I had caught glimpses of our native forests as transformed into the sturdiest of arts-andcrafts furniture. Flower and kitchen gardens alike were squeezed into compact plots of earth; a Gerald or a Geraldine cooed from a perambulator at the gate of at least every other establishment; and a ‘syndicate’ man-of-allwork moved serenely from furnace to furnace, from lawn to lawn, as the season determined. On Sundays I saw the young husbands hieing to church, to a golf links somewhere, to tennis in some vacant lot, or aiding their girlish wives in the cheerfulest fashion imaginable to spray rose-bushes or to drive the irrepressible dandelion from the lawn of its delight.

These phenomena interested me more than I can say. My aim was not wholly sociological, for not only did I wish in the spirit of strictest scientific inquiry to understand just how all this was possible, but the sentimental aspect of it exercised a strange fascination upon me. When I walked these new streets at night and saw lamps lighted in dozens of cheery habitations, with the lord and lady of the bungalow reading or talking in greatest contentment; or when their voices drifted out to me from nasturtium-hung verandahs on summer evenings, I was in danger of ceasing to be a philosopher and of going over bodily to the sentimentalists. Then, the scientific spirit mastering, I vulgarly haunted the doors of the adjacent shops and communed with grocers’ boys and drug-clerks, that I might gain data upon which to base speculations touching this species, this ‘group,’ which presented so gallant a front in a world where bills are payable not later than the tenth of every calendar month.

‘You may have the brown bungalow in Audubon Road, the gray one in Washington Hedge, or the dark green one in Landor Lane. Take any one you like; they all offer about the same accommodations,’ said the architect. ‘You can put such rent as you see fit in the nearest squirrel-box, and if you meet an intending purchaser with our prospectus in his hand I expect you to take notice and tease him to buy. We’ve always got another bungalow somewhere, so you won’t be thrown in the street.’

I chose Landor Lane for a variety of reasons. There were as yet only three houses in the street, and this assured a degree of peace. Many fine forest trees stood in the vacant lots, and a number had been suffered to remain within the parking retained between sidewalk and curb, mitigating greatly the harsh lines of the new addition. But I think the deciding factor was the name of the little street. Landor had always given me pleasure, and while it is possible that a residence in Huxley Avenue might have been more suitable for a seeker of truth, there was the further reflection that truth, touched with the iridescent glow of romance, need suffer nothing from contact with the spirit of Walter Savage Landor.

Directly opposite my green bungalow was a dark brown one flung up rather high above the lane. The promotors of the addition had refrained from smoothing out the landscape, so that the brown bungalow was about twenty feet above the street, while my green one was reached by only half a dozen steps.

On the day that I made my choice I saw a child of three playing in the grass plot before the brown bungalow.

It was Saturday afternoon, and the typical young freeholder and householder was doing something with an axe near the woodshed; and even as I surveyed the scene the domestic picture was completed by the appearance of the inevitable young woman, who came from the direction of the trolleyterminus, carrying the usual neat cardcase in her hand. Here was exactly what I wanted — a chance to study at close hand the bungalow type; and yet, Landor Lane was so quiet, its trio of houses so distributed, that I might enjoy that coveted detachment so essential to contemplative observation and wise judgments.

‘I’ve forgotten,’ mused the architect, as we viewed the scene together, ‘whether the chap in that brown bungalow is Redmond, the patent lawyer, or Manderson, the tile-grate man. There’s a baby of about the same vintage at both houses. If that is n’t Redmond over there showing Gladstonian prowess with the axe, it’s Manderson. Woman with child and cart; number 58; West Gallery; artist unknown.’—It pleased my friend’s humor to quote thus from imaginary catalogues. — ‘Well, I don’t know whether those are the Redmonds or the Mandersons; but come to think of it, Redmond is n’t a lawyer, but the inventor of a new office-system by which profit and loss are computed hourly by a device so simple that any child may operate it. A man of your cloistral habits won’t care about the neighbors, but I hope that chap is n’t Redmond. A man who will think up a machine like that is n’t one you’d expose perfectly good garden hose to, on dark summer nights.’

II

A Japanese boy who was working his way through college offered to assume the responsibilities of my housekeeping for his board. Banzai brought to the task of cooking the deft hand of his race. He undertook the purchase of furniture to set me up in the bungalow, without asking questions, — in itself a great relief. In a week’s time he announced that all was in readiness for my transfer, so that I made the change quite casually, without other impedimenta than a suit-case.

On that first evening, as Banzai served my supper, — he was a past master of the omelet, — I enjoyed a peace my life had not known before. In collecting material for my earlier sketches I had undeniably experienced many discomforts and annoyances; but here was an adventure which could hardly fail to prove pleasant and profitable.

As I loafed with my pipe after supper, I resolved to make the most of my good fortune and perfect a study of the bungalow as an expression of American civilization which should be the final word in that enthralling subject. I was myself, so to speak, a bungaloyd, — the owner or occupant of a bungalow, — and while I was precluded by my state of bachelorhood from entering fully into the life which had so aroused my curiosity, I was nevertheless confident that I should be able to probe deeply and sympathetically into the secret of the bungalow’s happiness.

Having arranged my books and papers I sought the open. Banzai had secured some porch furniture of a rustic pattern, but he had neglected to provide pillows, and as the chairs of hickory boughs were uncomfortable, I strolled out into the lane. As I stood in the walk, the door of the brown bungalow opened and a man came forth and descended to the street. It was a clear night with an abundance of stars, and the slim crescent of a young moon hung in the west. My neighbor struck a match and drew the flame into his pipe in four or five deliberate inhalations. In the match-flare I saw his face, which impressed me as sombre, though this may have been the effect of his dark, close-trimmed beard. He stood immovable for five minutes or more, then strolled aimlessly away down the lane.

Looking up, I saw a green-shaded lamp aglow in the front window of the bungalow, and almost immediately the young wife opened the door and came out hastily, anxiously. She ran halfway down the steps, with the light of the open door falling upon her, and after a hurried glance to right and left called softly, ‘Tom!’

‘Tom,’ she repeated more loudly; then she ran back into the house and reappeared, flinging a wrap over her shoulders, and walked swiftly away in the direction taken by the lord of the bungalow.

Could it be possible, I pondered, that the happiness I had attributed to bungalow folk was after all of such stuff as dreams are made of? There had been almost a sob in that second cry of ‘Tom!’ and I resented it. The scene was perfectly set; the green-shaded lamp had been lighted, ready for that communing of two souls which had so deeply moved and interested me as I had ranged the land of the bungalow; yet here was a situation which rose blackly in my imagination. I wvis surprised to find how quickly I took sides in this unhappy drama; I was all for the woman. The glimpse I had caught of her, tripping homeward in the lane, swinging her card-case, had been wholly pleasing; and I recalled the joyous quick rush with which she had clasped her child. I was sure that Tom was a monster, eccentric, selfish, indifferent. There had been a tiff, and he had gone off to sulk in the dark like a willful, perverse child.

I was patrolling my verandah half an hour later, when I heard steps and then voices on the walk opposite, and back they came. It is a woman’s way, I reflected, to make all the advances; and this young wife had captured the runaway and talked him into good humor. A moment later they were seated beside the table in the livingroom, and so disposed that the lamp did not obscure them from each other. She was reading aloud, and occasionally glanced up, whether to make sure of his attention or to comment upon the book I did not know; and when it occurred to me that it was neither dignified nor decent to watch my neighbors through their window, I went indoors and wrote several pages of notes for a chapter which I now felt must be written, on Bungalow Shadows.

Manderson was the name; Banzai made sure of this at the grocer’s. As I took the air of the lane the next morning before breakfast, I saw that the Redmonds were a different sort. Redmond, a big fellow, with a loud voice, was bidding his wife and child goodbye. The youngster toddled after him, the wife ran after the child, and there was much laughter. They all stopped to inspect me, and Redmond introduced himself and shook hands, with the baby clutching his knees. He presented me to his wife, and they welcomed me to the lane in the cheerfulest manner, to the baby’s cooing accompaniment. They restored me to confidence in the bungalow type; no doubt of the Redmonds being the real thing!

III

The lady of the brown bungalow was, however, far more attractive than her sister of the red one, and the Mandersons as a group were far more appealing than the Redmonds. My notebook filled with memoranda touching the ways and manners of the Mandersons, and most of these I must confess related to Mrs. Manderson. She was exactly the type I sought, the veritable dea ex machina of the bungalow world. She lived a good deal on her verandah, and as I had established a writingtable on mine I was able to add constantly to my notes by the mere lifting of my eyes. I excused my impudence in watching her on scientific grounds. She was no more to me than a new bird to an ornithologist, or a strange plant to a botanist.

Occasionally she would dart into the house and attack an upright piano that stood by the broad window of the living-room. I could see the firm clean stroke of her arms as she played. Those brilliant, flashing, golden things of Chopin’s she did wonderfully; or again it would be Schumann’s spirit she invoked. Once begun, she would run on for an hour, and Banzai would leave his kitchen and crouch on our steps to listen. She appeared at times quite fearlessly with a broom to sweep the walk, and she seemed to find a childish delight in sprinkling the laAvn. Or she would set off, basket in hand, for the grocer’s, and would return bearing her own purchases and none the less a lady for a’ that. There was about her an indefinable freshness and crispness. I observed with awe her succession of pink and blue shirt-waists, in which she caught and diffused the sun like a figure in one of Benson’s pictures; and when she danced off with her card-case in a costume of solid white, and with a floppy Avhite hat, she was not less than adorable.

Manderson nodded to me the second day, a little coldly, as we met in the walk; and thereafter nodded or waved a hand when I fell under his eye. One evening I heard him calling her across the dusk of the yard. Her name was Olive, and nothing, it seemed to me, was ever more fitting than that.

One morning as I wrote at my table on the verandah I was aroused by a commotion over the way. The girl-ofall-work appeared in the front yard screaming and wringing her hands, and I rushed across the lane to learn that the water-heater was possessed of an evil spirit and threatened to burst. The lady of the bungalow had gone to town and the peril was imminent. I reversed all the visible valves, in that trustful experimental spirit which is the flower of perfect ignorance, and the catastrophe was averted. I returned to my work, became absorbed, and was only aroused by a tug at my smoking jacket. Beside me stood the Manderson baby, extending a handful of dahlias! Her manner was of ambassadorial gravity. No word was spoken, and she trotted off, laboriously descended my steps and toddled across the lane.

Her mother waited at the curb, and as I bowed in my best manner, holding up the dahlias, she called, ‘Thank you! ’ in the most entrancing of voices. Mr. James declares that the way one person looks at anot her may be, in effect, an incident; and how much more may ’Thank you,’flung across a quiet street have the weight of hours of dialogue! Her voice was precisely the voice that the loveliest of feminine names connotes, suggesting Tennysonian harmonies and cadences, and murmuring waters of —

A bunch of dahlias was just the epistolary form to which a bungalow lady would resort in communicating with a gentleman she did not know. The threatened explosion of the heater had thus served to introduce me to my neighbor, and had given me at the same time a new revelation of her sense of the proprieties, her grace and charm. In my visit to the house I had observed its appointments with a discreet but interested eye, and I jotted down many notes with her dahlias on the table before me. The soft tints of the walls, the well-chosen American rugs, the comfort that spoke in the furniture, reflected a consistent taste. There was the usual den, with a long bench piled with cushions; and near at hand a table where a tray of smoker’s articles was hedged in with mazagines; and there were books neatly shelved, and others, lying about, testified to familiar use. The upright piano, by the window of my frequent contemplation, bore the imprimatur of one of the most reputable makers, and a tall rack beside it was filled with music. Prone on the player’s seat lay a doll — a fact I noted with satisfaction, as evidence of the bungalow baby’s supremacy even where its mother is a veritable reincarnation of St. Cecilia.

The same evening Manderson came home in haste and departed immediately with a suit-case. I had hoped that he would follow the dahlias in person to discuss the housemaid’s embarrassments with the plumbing and bring me within the arc of his domestic circle, but such was not to be the way of it.

He was gone three days, and while the lady of the bungalow now bowed to me once daily across the lane, our acquaintance progressed no further. Nor, I may add, did my work move forward according to the schedule by which it is my habit to write. I found myself scribbling verses, — a relaxation I had not indulged in since my college days. I walked much, surveying the other streets in Sherwood Forest Addition and gloomily comparing them with Landor Lane to their disadvantage. I tramped the shore of the little lake and saw her there once and again, at play with the baby. She and Mrs. Redmond exchanged visits frequently with bungalow informality. One afternoon half a dozen young women appeared for tea on the deep verandah, and the Lane was gay with laughter. They were the ladies of the surrounding bungalow district, and their party was the merriest. I wondered whether she had waited for a day when her husband was absent to summon these sisters. It was a gloomy fate that had mated her with a melancholy soul like Manderson.

IV

I had written several couplets imploring the protection of the gods for the Lady of the Lane, and these I had sketched upon a large sheet of card-board the better to scrutinize them. And thereby hangs the saddest of revelations. My friend the architect had sent me a number of advertisements with a request that I should persuade Banzai to attach them to the adjacent landscape. Returning from a tramp I beheld Olive (as I shall not scruple to call her) studying a placard on a telephone post in the lane a little beyond her bungalow. It struck me as odd that she should be so interested in a mere advertisement of bungalows, when she was already cosily domiciled in the prettiest one the addition boasted. She laughed aloud, then turned guardedly, saw me, and marched demurely home without so much as glancing a second time in my direction.

After she had tripped up the steps and vanished into her house, I saw the grievous thing that Banzai had done. By some inadvertence he had thrust the card bearing my verses among the advertisements; and with all the posts and poles and tree-boxes in Christendom to choose from, he had with unconscious malevolence nailed my couplets to the telephone pole nearest the Manderson bungalow. It was an unpardonable atrocity, the enormity of which I shall not extenuate by suppressing the verses: —

It was bad enough to apostrophize my neighbor’s wife in song; but to publish my infamy to the world was an even more grievous sin. I tore the thing down, bore it home, and thrust it into the kitchen range before the eyes of the contrite Banzai. Across the way Olive played, and I thought there was mockery in her playing.

Realism is, after all, on much better terms with Romance than the critics would have us believe. If Manderson had not thawed sufficiently to borrow the realistic monkey-wrench which Banzai used on our lawn-mower, and if Olive had not romantically returned it a week later with a card on which she had scribbled ‘Many apologies for the long delay,’ I might never have discovered that she was not in fact Manderson’s wife but his sister. Hers was the neatest, the best-bred of cards, and bore the name incontrovertibly —

MISS OLIVE MANDERSON

44 Landor Lane

I throw this to the realists that they may chortle over it in the way of their grim fraternity. Were I cursed with the least taint of romanticism I should not disclose her maiden state at this point, but hold it for stirring dramatic use at the moment when, believing her to be the wifeof the mournful tile-grate man, I should bid her good-bye and vanish forever.

The moment that card reached me by the hand of her housemaid she was playing a Chopin polonaise, and I was across the lane and reverently waiting at the door when the last chord sounded. It was late on an afternoon at the threshold of October, but not too cool for tea al fresco. When the wind blew chill from the lake she disappeared, and returned with her hands thrust prettily into the pockets of a white sweater.

It was amazing how well we got on from the first. She explained herself in the fewest words. Her brother’s wife had died two years before, and she had helped to establish a home for him in the hope of mitigating his loneliness. She spoke of him and the child with the tenderest consideration. He had been badly broken by his wife’s death, and was given to brooding. I accused myself bitterly for having so grossly misjudged him as to think him capable of harshness toward the fair lady of his bungalow. He came while I still sat there and greeted me amiably, and when I left we were established on the most neighborly footing.

Thenceforth my work prospered. Olive revealed, with the nicest, appreciation and understanding of my needs, the joys and sorrows of suburban bungalowhood. The deficiencies of the trolley service, the uncertainties of the grocer’s delivery, she described in the aptest phrases, and her buoyant spirit made light of all such vexations.

The manifold resources and subterfuges of bungalow housekeeping were unfolded with the drollest humor. The eternal procession of cooks, the lapses of the syndicate hired man, the fitfulness of the electric light,—all such tragedies were illuminated with her cheery philosophy. The magazine article that I had planned expanded into a discerning study of the secret which had baffled and lured me, as to the flowering of the bungalow upon the rough edges of the urban world. Peace, Hope, Love, reinforced or expressed by the upright piano, the perambulator, the new book on the arts-and-crafts table, the card-case borne through innumerable quiet lanes — all such phenomena Olive elucidated for my instruction. The shrewd economics that explained the occasional theatre tickets; the incubator that robbed the grocer to pay the milliner; the home-plied needle that accounted for the succession of crisp shirt-waists, — into these and many other mysteries Olive initiated me.

Sherwood Forest suddenly began to ‘boom,’and houses were in demand. My architect friend threatened me with eviction, and to avert the calamity I signed a contract of purchase, which bound me and my heirs and assigns forever to certain weekly payments; and, blithe opportunist that I am, I based a chapter on this circumstance, with the caption ‘Five Dollars a Month for Life.’ I wrote from notes supplied by Olive a dissertation on ‘The Pursuit of the Lemon,’ — suggested by an adventure of her own in search of the fruit of the citrus limonum for use in garnishing a plate of canned salmon for Sunday evening tea.

Inspired by the tender wistful autumn days I wrote verses laboriously, and boldly hung them in the lane in the hope of arresting my Rosalind’s eye. One of these (tacked to a tree in a path by the lake) I here insert to illustrate the plight to which she had brought me: —

V

Olive suffered my rhyming with the same composure with which she met the unpreluded passing of a maid-ofall-work, or the ill-natured smoking of the furnace on the first day it was fired. She preferred philosophy to poetry, and borrowed Nietzsche from the branch library. She persuaded me that the ladies of the bungalows are all practical persons, and so far as I am concerned, Olive fixed the type. It had seemed to me, as I viewed her comings and goings at long range, that she commanded infinite leisure; and yet her hours were crowded with activities. I learned from her that cooks with diplomas are beyond the purses of most bungalow housekeepers; and as Olive’s brother’s digestive apparatus was most delicate she assumed the responsibility of composing cakes and pastries for his pleasure. With tea (and we indulged in much teaing) she gave me golden sponge-cake of her own making which could not have failed to delight the severest Olympian critic. Her sand tarts established a new standard for that most delectable item of the cook book. She ironed with her own hands the baby’s more fragile frocks. Nor did such manual employments interfere in any way whatever with the delicacy of her touch upon the piano. She confided to me that she made a practice of reviewing French verbs at the ironing board with a grammar propped before her. She belonged to a club which was studying Carlyle’s French Revolution, and she was secretary of a musical society, — formed exclusively of the mistresses of bungalows, who had highly resolved to devote the winter to the study of the works of John Sebastian Bach.

It gradually became clear that the romance of the American bungalow was reinforced and strengthened by a realism which was in itself romance, and I was immensely stimulated by this discovery. It was refreshing to find that there are after all no irreconcilable differences between a pie well made and a Chopin polonaise well played. Those who must quibble over the point may file their demurrers, if they so please, with the baby asleep in the perambulator on the nearest bungalow verandah, and the child, awaking, will overrule it with a puckered face and a cry that brings mamma on the run with Carlyle in her hand.

VI

Olive was twenty-five. Twenty-five is the standard age, so to speak, of bungalow matrons. My closest scrutiny has failed to discover one a day older. It is too early for any one to forecast the ultimate fate of the bungalow. The bungalow speaks for youth, and whether it will survive as an architectural type, or whether those hopeful young married persons who trustingly kindle their domestic altars in bungalow fire-places will be found there in contentment at fifty, is not for this writing. What did strike me was the fact that Olive, being twenty-five, was an anomaly as a bungalow lady by reason of her unmarriedness. Her domesticity was complete, her efficiency indisputable, her charm ineffable; and it seemed that here was a chance to perfect a type which I, with my strong scientific bent, could not suffer to pass. By the mere process of changing the name on her visiting card and moving from a brown to a green bungalow she might become the perfect representation of the most interesting and delightful type of American women. Half of my study of bungalow life was finished, and a publisher to whom I submitted the early chapters returned them immediately with a blank contract, so that I was able to view the future in that jaunty confidence with which young folk entrust their fate to the bungalow gods.

I looked up from my writing-table, which the chill air had driven indoors, and saw Olive on her lawn engaged in some mysterious occupation. She was whistling the while she dabbed paint with a brush and a sophisticated air upon the bruised legs of the baby’s high chair.

At my approach Romance nudged Realism. Or maybe it was Realism that nudged Romance. I cannot see that it makes the slightest difference, one way or another, on whose initiative I spoke: let it suffice that I did speak. Realism and Romance tripped away and left me alone with the situation. When I had spoken Olive rose, viewed her work musingly, with head slightly tilted, and still whistling touched the foot-rest of the baby-chair lingeringly with the paint-brush. These neat cans of prepared paint which place the most fascinating of joys within the range of womankind are in every wellregulated bungalow tool-closet — and another chapter for my book began working in my subconsciousness.

A little later Romance and Realism returned and stood to right and left of us by the living-room fire. Realism, in the outward form of W.D.H., winked at Romance as represented by R.L.S. W.D.H., in a pepper-and-salt sack-suit, played with his eyeglasses; R.L.S., in a velvet jacket, toyed with his dagger-hilt.

Olive informed me that her atrabilious brother was about to marry a widow in Emerson Road, so there seemed to be no serious obstacle to the immediate perfecting of Olive as a type by a visit to the young clergyman in the white bungalow in Channing Lane, on the other side of Sherwood Forest Addition. Romance and Realism therefore quietly withdrew and left us to discuss the future.

‘I think,’ said Olive with a far-away look in her eyes, ‘that there should be a box of geraniums on our verandah rail next summer, and that a hen-house could be built back of the coal-shed without spoiling the looks of the yard.’

As I saw no objection whatever to these arrangements, we took the baby for a walk, met Tom at the car, and later we all dined together at the brown bungalow. I seem to recall that there was roast fowl for dinner, a salad with the smoothest of mayonnaise, canned apricots, and chocolate layer-cake, and a Schumann programme afterward.