Helena, when a year's passing had worn away the novelty of keeping house and made its process slower, was naturally rather bored at times, when Hubert was shut up with his work. No one could have been happier so long as she was with her husband; she still thought him immensely clever, which is most good for married happiness; still found their walks and treats the very greatest fun; but in the winter especially, there were so many gaps of idle loneliness. Luckily the remedy was near at hand. To a girl almost bursting with the ashamed desire for self-development a garden suburb must be Paradise indeed. There is a natural connection between New Art cottages with gardens round, and (let us say) enthusiasms. The ordinary man--that tame myope who gratefully accepts life as it is--contentedly exists in squares, crescents and straight lines; breathing the common air and never worrying at all whether his house, which may be number 246, has individuality or not. But the enthusiast, whom others call by a less noble title, is of a different sort. He holds that what we see and breathe, especially when young, we are. His children, then, must have a quite uncommon setting; not grown like the sordid brats in 245 "desirable villas" adjoining. No, they must live where there is air and a big back-yard patch; where the word garden throws a soft glamour over muddied and unfinished roads; where everything is beautiful and man himself is not so vile. For, after all, he asks, what really wicked man would ever trouble to live out at a tube's end? No! Vice ever lurks among the fogs and shrubless rabbit-warrens of mid-London. It would not flourish in a garden suburb. So out he goes, and sees to it that his house shall have something different from all the other small white dwellings round about him. An architect might say that there was neither use nor fitness in his timbered turret at the north-east corner, but he himself knows just why it is there. He knows that he has flung his little pebble, all he can avail, upon the heap that some day, we all hope, will crush the soul-destroying isms out of life, and make of man, not a type in monotone, but a great hive of multi-coloured individuals. So far, so good; but more remains to tell.