The dulness--the appalling dulness of it. The long evenings in the one small living room. She would have to learn sewing--make her own dresses, while Anthony read aloud to her. He read rather well. Perhaps, by help of great economy in the housekeeping, they might be able to purchase a piano, on the hire system--or would it have to be a harmonium? She had risen. From the window, she could see the cloud of smoke beneath which the people of Millsborough moved and had their being. Why should it seem so impossible. Her present ordered existence, mapped out from year to year, calling for neither thought nor effort, admitting of neither hope nor fear, the sheltered life of a pampered child--had not that also its dulness, its monotony? Why did rich people rent saeters in Norway, live there for months at a time on hunter’s fare, doing their own cooking and cleaning--welcome the perils and hardships of mountain climbing; of big game shooting; of travels into unknown lands; choose danger, privation and toil, and call it a “holiday”? Had not she herself found the simple living and hard work of the hospital a welcome change from everlasting luxuriousness? Would the Garden of Eden have been the ideal home for men and women with brains and hands? Might not earning one’s living by the sweat of one’s brow be better sport? Need those evenings after the day’s work was done be of necessity so deadly? Her great dinners at The Abbey, with all their lights and lackeys, had they always been such feasts of intellectuality? Surely she had had social experience enough to teach her that brains were a thing apart from birth and breeding, that wit and wisdom were not the monopoly of the well-to-do. It came back to her, the memory of her girlhood’s days when they had lived in third-rate boarding-houses in Rome and Florence; rented small furnished _appartements_ in French provincial towns; cheap lodgings in Dresden and Hanover. There had been no lack of fun and laughter in those days. Those musical evenings to which each student brought his own beer, and was mightily careful to take back with him the empty bottles, for which otherwise ten pfennigs would be charged. How busy she and her mother had been beforehand, cutting the sandwiches, and how sparing of the butter! Some of the players had made world-famous names; and others had died or maybe still lived--unknown. One of them she had heard just recently, paying ten guineas for her box; but his music had sounded no sweeter than when she had listened to it sitting beside Jim on the uncarpeted floor, there not being chairs enough to go round. Where had she heard better talk than from the men with shiny coat sleeves and frayed trousers who had come to sup with her father off maccaroni and chianti at two lire the flask. There might be clever brilliant men and women even in Millsborough. So far as she could judge she had never succeeded in securing any of them for her great receptions at The Abbey. They might