Istra shut the door resolutely. The hall was dark. It was gratefully quiet. She snatched up Mr. Wrenn’s hand and held it to her breast. “Oh, Mouse dear, I’m so bored! I want some real things. They talk and talk in there, and every night they settle all the fate of all the nations, always the same way. I don’t suppose there’s ever been a bunch that knew more things incorrectly. You hated them, didn’t you?” “Why, I don’t think you ought to talk about them so severe,” he implored, as they started down-stairs. “I don’t mean they’re like you. They don’t savvy like you do. I mean it! But I was awful int’rested in what that Miss Johns said about kids in school getting crushed into a mold. Gee! that’s so; ain’t it? Never thought of it before. And that Mrs. Stettinius talked about Yeats so beautiful.” “Oh, my dear, you make my task so much harder. I want you to be different. Can’t you see your cattle-boat experience is realer than any of the things those half-baked thinkers have done? I _know_. I’m half-baked myself.” “Oh, I’ve never done nothing.” “But you’re ready to. Oh, I don’t know. I want—I wish Jock Seton—the filibuster I met in San Francisco—I wish he were here. Mouse, maybe I can make a filibuster of you. I’ve got to create something. Oh, those people! If you just knew them! That fool Mary Stettinius is mad about that Tchatzsky person, and her husband invites him to teas. Stettinius is mad about Olympia, who’ll probably take Carson out and marry him, and he’ll keep on hanging about the Greek girl. Ungh!” “I don’t know—I don’t know—” But as he didn’t know what he didn’t know she merely patted his arm and said, soothingly: “I won’t criticize your first specimens of radicals any more. They are trying to do something, anyway.” Then she added, in an irrelevant tone, “You’re exactly as tall as I am. Mouse dear, you ought to be taller.” They were entering the drab stretch of Tavistock Place, after a silence as drab, when she exclaimed: “Mouse, I am _so_ sick of everything. I want to get out, away, anywhere, and do something, anything, just so’s it’s different. Even the country. I’d like—Why couldn’t we?” “Let’s go out on a picnic to-morrow, Istra.” “A picnic picnic? With pickles and a pillow cushion and several kinds of cake?… I’m afraid the Bois Boulogne has spoiled me for that…. Let me think.” She drooped down on the steps of their house. Her head back, her supple strong throat arched with the passion of hating boredom, she devoured the starlight dim over the stale old roofs across the way. “Stars,” she said. “Out on the moors they would come down by you…. What is _your_ adventure—your formula for it?… Let’s see; you take common roadside things seriously; you’d be dear and excited over a Red Lion Inn.” “Are there more than one Red Li—”