Anne blushed. "Of course it suits some people, now," she amended, hastily. "Perhaps it's all right to keep house, if you have a big family, or lots of money and can hire all the fussing done." "You don't need to hire fussing, if you've a big family," said Aunt Milly, her eyes twinkling behind the gold-bowed spectacles. "You'll keep on with the drawing--illustrating?" "Surely," answered Anne. "Burt will keep right on being a lawyer." "I see," said George. "Well, Queen Anne, I suppose when we want to visit you we can hire a room in the same block, I mean, hotel. I thought, perhaps, having so far conformed to the habits of us Philistines as to take a husband, you might go the whole figure and take a house!" "Please!" begged Anne. In that tone, it was a catchword dating back to nursery days which the elf-like Anne had shared with a whole brood of sturdy cousins, and meant, "Please stop fooling; I want to be taken seriously." "I love to draw--but my people don't look alive, somehow," said little Milly, wistfully. Cried Anne: "Keep trying, Milly; there is nothing so lovely as to have even a taste for some sort of creative work, and to develop it; to express your own personality in something tangible, and to be encouraged to do so. Do understand me, Auntie and the rest; it isn't that I want to shirk, but I do want to specialize on what I do best! I'll wash dishes if it's ever necessary, but why must I wish a whole pantry on myself when either Burt or I could pay our proportionate share of a hotel dish-washer, or butler, or whatever is needed?" At the studio it was much easier. "Some time in the early fall," Anne told her callers, who arrived by two's, three's and four's, as the news began to circulate among her friends. "No, I won't keep this," with a jerk of her thumb towards the big, bare room which had been hers since she left Aunt Milly and the little home town. "There's a room at the top of the Kensington I can have, with a light as good as this, and that settles the last problem. I'd hate to have to go outdoors for meals, when I'm working." "Nan Gilbert!" exclaimed her dearest friend. "You have the best luck! You can do good work, and get good pay for it, and be happy all by yourself; and now you're going to be happier, with a husband who'll let you live your own life; you'll be absolutely free, not even a percolator to bother with, nothing to take your mind from your own creative work, free to express your own personality!" "Mercy," said Anne, closing the door upon this last caller. "If I don't set the North River, at least, on fire, pretty soon, they'll all call me a slacker."