There were no bathrooms in West Salem in 1899--the plumber was still the tinner, and when the news of my ambitious designs got abroad it created almost as much comment as my brother's tennis court had roused some five years earlier. As a force making toward things high-fi-lutin, if not actually un-American, I was again discussed. Some said, "I can't understand how Hamlin makes all his money." Others remarked, "Easy come, easy go!" Something unaccountable lay in the scheme of my life. It was illogical, if not actually illegal. "How can he go skittering about all over the world in this way?" asked William McEldowney, and Sam McKinley said to my mother, "I swear, I don't see how you and Dick ever raised such a boy. He's a 'sport,'--that's what he is, a freak." To all of which mother answered only with a silent laugh. The carpenters came, together with a crew of stonemasons, and the old kitchen began to move southward, giving place for the foundations of the new dining-room. By the end of the week, the lawn was littered with material and tools, and the frame-work was enclosed. My mother, in her anxiety to justify the enormous outlay said, "Well, anyhow, these improvements are not entirely for me, they will make the house all the nicer for my New Daughter when she comes." "That's true," I answered, "I hadn't thought of that." "It's _time_ you thought of it. You're almost forty years old," she replied with humorous emphasis, then she added, "I begin to think I never _will_ see your wife." "Just you wait," I jestingly replied. "The case is not so hopeless as you think--I have just received a letter which gives me a 'prospect.'" I said this merely to divert her, but she seized upon my remark with alarming seriousness. "Read me the letter. Where does she live?--Tell me all about her." Being in so far I thought it could do no harm to go a little farther. I described (still in bantering mood) my first meeting with Zulime Taft more than five years before. I pictured her as she looked to me then, and as she afterward appeared when I met her a second time in the home of her sister in Chicago. "I admit that I was greatly impressed by her," I went on, "but just when I had begun to hope for a better understanding, her brother Lorado chilled me with the information that she was about to be claimed by another man. To be honest about it, mother, I am not sure that she is interested in me even now; although one of her friends has just written me to say that Lorado was mistaken, and that Zulime is not engaged to any one. I am going down to visit some friends at the camp to test the truth of this; but don't say a word about it, for my information may be wrong."