"Yes, but I don't suppose we reason the same way as he does." "Well, here's one for four thousand pounds. That's not so bad. I mean as a price, not as a house." "Have you got four thousand pounds?" "No; I was hoping _you_ had." "Couldn't you mortgage something--up to the hilt?" "We'll have a look," I said. We spent the rest of that day looking for something to mortgage, but found nothing with a hilt at all high up. "Anyhow," I said, "it was a rotten house." "Wouldn't it be simpler," said Celia, "to put in an advertisement ourselves, describing exactly the sort of house we want? That's the way I always get servants." "A house is so much more difficult to describe than a cook." "Oh, but I'm sure _you_ could do it. You describe things so well." Feeling highly flattered, I retired to the library and composed. For the first hour or so I tried to do it in the _staccato_ language of house-agents. They say all they want to say in five lines; I tried to say all we wanted to say in ten. The result was hopeless. We both agreed that we should hate to live in that sort of house. Celia indeed seemed to feel that if I couldn't write better than that we couldn't afford to live in a house at all. "You don't seem to realise," I said, "that in the ordinary way people pay _me_ for writing. This time, so far from receiving any money, I have actually got to hand it out in order to get into print at all. You can hardly expect me to give my best to an editor of that kind." "I thought that the artist in you would insist on putting your best into _everything_ that you wrote, quite apart from the money." Of course after that the artist in me had to pull himself together. An hour later it had delivered itself as follows:--