“Well, we’ll see what Fulkerson says. He may see an ad. in it. Would you like to do it?” “Why not do it yourself? Nobody else could do it so well.” “Thanks for the taffy; but the idea was yours.” “I’ll do it,” said Kendricks after a moment, “if you won’t.” “We’ll see.” Miss Gage stared, and Mrs. March said— “I didn’t suppose the House of Pansa would lead to shop with you two.” “You never can tell which way copy lies,” I returned; and I asked the girl, “What should _you_ think, Miss Gage, of a little paper with a thread of story, but mostly talk, on a supposititious Pompeian cottage?” “I don’t believe I understand,” said she, far too remote from our literary interests, as I saw, to be ashamed of her ignorance. “There!” I said to Kendricks. “Do you think the general public would?” “Miss Gage isn’t the general public,” said my wife, who had followed the course of my thought; her tone implied that Miss Gage was wiser and better. “Would you allow yourself to be drawn,” I asked, “dreamily issuing from an aisle of the pine grove as the tutelary goddess of a Pompeian cottage?” The girl cast a bewildered glance at my wife, who said, “You needn’t pay any attention to him, Miss Gage. He has an idea that he is making a joke.” We felt that we had done enough for one afternoon, when we had done the House of Pansa, and I proposed that we should go and sit down in Congress Park and listen to the Troy band. I was not without the hope that it would play “Washington Post.” My wife contrived that we should fall in behind the young people as we went, and she asked, “What _do_ you suppose she made of it all?” “Probably she thought it was the house of Sancho Panza.” “No; she hasn’t read enough to be so ignorant even as that. It’s astonishing how much she doesn’t know. What can her home life have been like?” “Philistine to the last degree. We people who are near to literature have no conception how far from it most people are. The immense majority of ‘homes,’ as the newspapers call them, have no books in them except the Bible and a semi-religious volume or two—things you never see out of such ‘homes’—and the State business directory. I was astonished when it came out that she knew about _Every Other Week_. It must have been by accident. The sordidness of her home life must be something unimaginable. The daughter of a village capitalist, who’s put together his money dollar by dollar, as they do in such places, from the necessities and follies of his neighbours, and has half the farmers of the region by the throat through his mortgages—I don’t think that she’s ‘one to be desired’ any more than ‘the daughter of a hundred earls,’ if so much.” “She doesn’t seem sordid herself.” “Oh, the taint doesn’t show itself at once— ‘If nature put not forth her power About the opening of the flower, Who is it that would live an hour?’ and she _is_ a flower, beautiful, exquisite.”