’You see,’ said Ross, pointing to them with great pride, ’how the charm works. "My wife is afraid of beetles"—you get them—beautiful specimens. You want a house not quite finished—you are sent to one tumbling down. Now, if this could be worked out to its logical conclusion you would, of course, get your ideal home. I must do it on paper and try to get a formula. Let’s go back to the agents, Florrie.’ ’Not I—never again,’ I said. So we returned to Fernfold for lunch. It’s so jolly now the Spiders have gone. The Poppet has a nice day nursery and Ross a better bedroom. He says he misses the lumps in his mattress dreadfully, and his bed is now so comfortable that he cannot sleep. To-night, after I was in ’my byes,’ as the Gidger calls it, Ross came to say good-night. He was so quaint. ’Meg, something that you said to-day has rankled horribly.’ ’Practically everything you say every day always does with me.’ ’No, but Meg, _do_ I ever put bad words into your mind?’ ’Oh, Ross,’ I said, and giggled hopelessly. ’But, darling, do you know any?’ ’Why, yes, I know several: Damn’s one, only daddy forbade me to say it once, and somehow I’ve never got into the way of it, and since the war I say Hell sometimes, not that I mean to swear, only it does seem like Hell.’ ’The Germans seem inspired by the devil, if that’s what you mean,’ said Ross. ’And I say "infernal" sometimes. Daddy told me I might.’ ’I bet he didn’t, Meg.’ ’He did, I tell you, if I always thought of Devonshire when I said it.’ ’Daddy is topping,’ said my brother, as he remembered the old joke, ’well, go on.’ ’I think that’s all I know,’ I replied. ’Oh, he said, ’how white women are. I wish they were all I knew.’ ’But surely, Ross, not knowing a thing doesn’t make a person "white." If you know a lot and don’t say them, by the grace of God, I should have thought that was being "white."’ *CHAPTER XI* The Gidger came in from a drive bursting with excitement and importance. ’Muvver, _I’ve_ found you a house, it’s the darlingest you ever saw, very old, and the drawing-room has got a pump in it, and there’s a pig, too.’ ’In the drawing-room, Gidger?’ Ross inquired; ’that sounds as if it might do. Your mother likes a pig under her bed, and so did her grandmother.’ ’Nannie and I went all over it, muvver. One of the bedrooms has a funny little place leading out of it, the lady said she thought it was a powdering closet.’ ’Get the telegraph forms and tell Mr Cardew Thompkins we’re suited,’ cried Ross, getting up in a great hurry. ’Of course it’s _the_ house; you’re a jewel, Gidger. We never in our wildest moments hoped for a powdering closet.’ ’I don’t know what the drainage is like,’ said Nannie. ’Fancy talking of drainage and a powder closet in the same century,’ said Ross indignantly, ’let’s have lunch at once, Meg, and catch the Longcross bus and go and see it.’