“Oh, good heavens!” murmured her lodger, but she went on quickly: “You know I was going to open the soup-kitchen in October. Well, I've just thought, Why not get the Rooms all ready, and the reading-room moved over there, and have lemonade and sandwiches and sarsaparilla, and Kitty Waters to begin to serve right away, as she's beginning to run the streets again, and Annabel Riley with her? Then the Civic Club can have its headquarters there, and people will begin to be used to it before cold weather.” “And I am to serve sarsaparilla and sandwiches with Kitty and Annabel? Really, dear Miss Gould, if you knew how horribly ill sarsaparilla is certain to make me--I have loathed it from childhood--” “Oh, no, no, no!” she interrupted, with her sweet, tolerant smile. She smiled at him as if he had been a child. “You know I never meant that you should work all day, Mr. Welles. It isn't at all necessary. I have always felt that an hour or two a day of intelligent, cultivated work was fully equal to a much longer space of manual labor that is more mechanical, more tiresome.” “Better fifty years of poker than a cycle of croquet!” her lodger murmured. “Yes, I have always felt that myself.” “And somebody must be there from ten to twelve, say, in the mornings, in what we call the office; just to keep an eye on things, and answer questions about the kitchen, and watch the reading-room, and recommend the periodicals, and take the children's Civic League reports, and oversee the Rooms generally. Now I'd be there Wednesdays to meet the mothers, and Mrs. Underwood Saturdays for the Band of Hope and the kitchen-garden. It would be just Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays from ten to twelve, say!” “From ten to twelve, say,” he repeated absently, with his eyes on her handsome, eager face. He had never seen her so animated, so girlishly insistent. She urged with the vivid earnestness of twenty years. “My dear lady,” he brought out finally, “you are like Greek architecture or Eastlake furniture or--or 'God Save the Queen'--perfectly absolute! And I am so hideously relative--But, after all, why should a sense of humor be an essential? One is really more complete--I suppose Mahomet had none--When shall I begin?” The interested villagers were informed early and regularly of the progress of the latest scheme of their benefactress. Henry and Mr. Waters furnished most satisfactory and detailed bulletins to gatherings of leisurely and congenial spirits, who listened with incredulous amazement to the accounts of Mr. Welles's proceedings.