The storm outside grew wilder and wilder. The scene inside grew snugger and snugger. The room was warm, the lamps well shaded, the tables piled with books, the chairs themselves deep as waves. "Loaf and let loaf" was the motto of the evening. By pulling the huge wolf-skin rug away from the hearth, the May Girl and young Kennilworth achieved for their village a plane of smoothness and light that gleamed as fair and sweet as a real village common at high noon. Curled up in a fluff of white the May Girl sat cross-legged in the middle of it superintending operations through a maze of sunny hair. Stretched out at full-length on the floor beside her, looking for all the world like some beautiful exotic-faced little lad, young Kennilworth lay on his elbows, adjusting, between incongruous puffs of cigarette smoke, the faintly shattered outline of a miniature church and spire, or soothing a blister of salt sea tears from the paint-crackled visage of a tiny villa. Softly the firelight flickered and flamed across their absorbed young faces. Mysteriously the wisps of cigarette smoke merged realities with unrealities. It was an entrancing picture. And one by one everybody in the room except Rollins and myself became drawn more or less into it. "If you're going to do it at all," argued Paul Brenswick, "you might as well do it right! When you start in to lay out a village you know there are certain general scientific principles that must be observed. Now that list to the floor there! What about drainage? Can't you see that you've started the whole thing entirely wrong?" "But I wanted it to face toward the fire," drooped the May Girl, "like a village looking on the wonders of Vesuvius." "Vesuvius nothing!" insisted Paul Brenswick. "It's got to have good drainage!" Enchanted by his seriousness, the Bride rushed off up-stairs with her scissors to rip the foliage off her second-best hat to make a hedge for the church-yard. Even Allan John came sliding just a little bit out of his chair when he noted that there was a large, rather humpy papier-mache mountain in the outfit that seemed likely to be discarded. "I would like to have that mountain put--there!" he pointed. "Against that table shadow . . . And the mountain's name is Blue Blurr!" "Oh, very well," acquiesced everybody. "The mountain's name is Blue Blurr!" It was George Keets who suggested taking the little bronze Psyche from the mantelpiece to make a monument for the public square. "Of course there'll be some in your village," he deprecated, "who'll object to its being a nude. But as a classic it----" "It's a bear! It's a bear! It's a bear!" chanted Kennilworth in exultant falsetto. "Speaking of classics!" "Hush!" said George Keets. . . . George Keets really wanted very much to play, I think, but he didn't know exactly how to, so he tried to talk highbrow instead. "This village of yours," he frowned, "I--I hope it's going to have good government?"