The clerk didn't appreciate my suggestion. He insisted that the seventeenth was the only day. "Then will you have the seventeenth?" he asked. "My dear fellow, I can't possibly say off-hand," I protested. "I am not alone in this. I have a friend with me. I will go back and tell her what you say. She may decide to withdraw her offer altogether." I went back and told Celia. "Bother," she said. "What shall we do?" "There are other churches. There's your own, for example." "Yes, but you know I don't like that. Why _shouldn't_ we be married on the seventeenth?" "I don't know at all. It seems an excellent day; it lets in my Uncle Thomas. Of course, it may exclude my Uncle William, but one can't have everything." "Then will you go and fix it for the seventeenth to-morrow?" "Can't I send my solicitor this time?" I asked. "Of course, if you particularly want me to go myself, I will. But really, dear, I seem to be living at St. Miriam's nowadays." And even that wasn't the end of the business. For, just as I was leaving her, Celia broke it to me that St. Miriam's was neither in her parish nor in mine, and that, in order to qualify as a bridegroom, I should have to hire a room somewhere near. "But I am very comfortable where I am," I assured her. "You needn't live there, Ronald. You only want to leave a hat there, you know." "Oh, very well," I sighed. She came to the hall with me; and, having said good-bye to her, I repeated my lesson. "The seventeenth, fix it up to-morrow, take a room near St. Miriam's, and leave a hat there. Good-bye." "Good-bye.... And oh, Ronald!" She looked at me critically as I stood in the doorway. "You might leave _that_ one," she said. II.--FURNISHING "By the way," said Celia suddenly, "what have you done about the fixtures?" "Nothing," I replied truthfully. "Well, we must do _something_ about them." "Yes. My solicitor--he shall do something about them. Don't let's talk about them now. I've only got three hours more with you, and then I must dash back to my work." I must say that any mention of fixtures has always bored me intensely. When it was a matter of getting a house to live in I was all energy. As soon as Celia had found it, I put my solicitor on to it; and within a month I had signed my name in two places, and was the owner of a highly residential flat in the best part of the neighbourhood. But my effort so exhausted me that I have felt utterly unable since to cope with the question of the curtain-rod in the bathroom or whatever it is that Celia means by fixtures. These things will arrange themselves somehow, I feel confident.