"It reminds me," I continued, "of a dolls' house I once had, made out of a packing-case, neatly divided into four compartments, with a staircase jammed against one side of it and brought to an abrupt termination by the doorstep. The staircase is exactly like my dolls' house one, so steep that a false step lands one straight in the front garden with no conscious interval for falling. Mrs. Jim kindly provides against this contingency by leaving the front door always open," I added hastily, in deference to a look of renewed concern. The lady of the manor agreed that there was something in what I said about the defects of modern architecture. "They do not build as they once did," she observed sententiously; "but then, the peasantry is not what it used to be. If the poor were still thrifty and hard-working, and did their own brewing and baking----" "How can they?" I interposed. "You should see Mrs. Bunce's daily attempt to cook me a milk-pudding in an oven that never bakes anything equally on both sides, and sometimes refuses to bake at all. Oh! I never know what or why the poor are supposed to brew, but I do know that they cannot bake in the houses they are obliged to live in." "My dear," was the reply I received to all this, "you have only yourself to blame for seeking impossibilities in a country cottage, when you might have settled down with your typewriter in the blue room over the library, and had your meals regularly. I do not pity you in the least." "I do not pity myself," I said. "The person to be pitied is the person who cannot escape, never the person who can." As I walked back to the cottage that was built on the plan of a dolls' house, I wondered how long it would be before I availed myself of my privilege of escape. When I first became Mrs. Jim Bunce's lodger, a polite fiction existed that I was to dwell apart in the two front rooms, away from the family, a detached and superior position that might have made the writing of books a possibility. Unfortunately, this magnificent isolation had to yield to the force of numbers. There was only a sketchy, ill-fitting door between me and the kitchen, and I shared to some extent in the family joys and sorrows--they were generally sorrows--even when this was closed. More often it gave way before sudden pressure, and burst open to admit a crawling baby, followed by an assortment of small boys, pigs, chickens, puppies, and anything else that was young and undisciplined, brought up tempestuously at the rear by Mrs. Bunce and a broom. The writing of books did not thrive under these conditions, nor in the more strenuous moments that followed when the baby girl, bored and whimpering, had been carried off and set upon the flagstones under my window with nothing more thrilling to engage her attention than a piece of firewood.