my part--lurking in the hall and beginning to think what I should say if Miss Augusta did give me a rowing up salt river--I wanted to clap my hands when Miss Lois remarked to Mr. Tillinghast ‘Gussie talks too much.’ I walked in on them. I was very nice about it. But they were scandalized at my having listened.” I was having a splendid time. “How about this matter of a child?” I asked, to keep her going. She became merry over it. “It all came out of my leaving Nick alone in the summers. Poor old Nick! He’s sentimental. After the first summer, he told me that my study had gleamed with coppery flashes of a threat. The summer is dreadful, in New York, isn’t it?” I laughed at her. “Had you no remorse at leaving him in a caldron?” She said that she always arranged the house beautifully for him, with dust covers gay as a summer resort. The window-boxes, she stated virtuously, were festively in bloom. And there was always Mattie to see to his comfort. There was no excuse, beyond his sentimentality, for the habit into which he dropped of staying late at his office. Mattie had reported that he never came home to dinner. However, his explanation, given to Eva upon her return in the autumn, was the point upon which her sympathy for his plight laughingly rested. The fact that construction of the new city went on relentlessly, undampened by the weather, meant nothing to her; the fact that he worked under pressure brought forth from her the comment that American men were almost revolting in their frenzy over their drab business; but when he told her that he could better conceive of the ultimate in height when gazing from the high windows of his office at the panorama of the city by night she understood. Somewhere in the jewelled pattern of this city surrounded by water there lay, also brightly jewelled, the inspiration that he had felt to be failing him. Until the squares of light that were windows had turned black, he told her, he would lean from his own window and look down on this fabric of the latest assumption of man. I interrupted: “Are you putting this into his mouth?”