But still, for a year or so he had his cottage in rural Kent and was a Writer. He dreamed his dream, though it was a pretty silly and castrated dream. If he hadn’t married Isabel and gotten her with child, he might have made quite a reasonably good literary hack. But, Oh! those hostages given to Fortune! **** ***** **** *****, *** **** **** **** **** ***** ******. * * * * * As for Isabel, she was happy for the first, and perhaps the last time in her life. She adored her cottage in rural Kent. What did it matter that George Augustus wasted his time Writing? He still had about £170 and earned a few guineas a month by articles and stories. But for her the thrill was having a real home of her own. She furnished the cottage herself, partly with the heavy mahogany 1850 stuff George Augustus had brought from Sheffield, partly with her own atrocious taste and bamboo. George urged her to furnish “artistically,” and the resultant chaos of huge solid stodgy curly mahogany and flimsy bamboo, palms, cauliflower chintzes and framed photographs would have rendered the late Mr. Oscar Wilde plaintive in less than fifty seconds. Never mind, Isabel was happy. She had her home and she had George Augustus under her eye and thumb, and she had her baby—whom she adored with all the selfishness of a pure woman—and, best of all, she did NOT have dear Mamma pestering and sneering and praying at her through every hour of the day and at every turn. Dear Isabel, how happy she was in her hum-ble little ho-o-me! Put it to yourself, now. Suppose you had been one of an innumerable family, enduring all the abominable discomforts and lack of privacy in that elementary Soviet System. And suppose you had then been uncomfortably impregnated and most painfully delivered, and then bullied and pried into and domineered over and tortured by dear Mamma; wouldn’t you be glad to have a home of your own, however humble, and however flimsily based on sandy foundations of WRITING and art-y ties? Of course you would. So Isabel looked after the baby, _tant bien que mal_, and cooked abominable meals, and was swindled by the tradesmen, and ran up bills which frightened her, and let young George catch croup and nearly die, and didn’t interrupt George Augustus’s wooing of the Muse more than half a dozen times a morning and—was happy. * * * * *