For a year they lived in hotels, travelled to California, to Alaska, to Florida, to Mexico, loved and quarrelled gently, and gloried in the golden triflings of his wit with her beauty--they were young and gravely passionate; they demanded everything and then yielded everything again in ecstasies of unselfishness and pride. She loved the swift tones of his voice and his frantic, if unfounded jealousy. He loved her dark radiance, the white irises of her eyes, the warm, lustrous enthusiasm of her smile. “Don’t you like her?” he would demand rather excitedly and shyly. “Isn’t she wonderful? Did you ever see--” “Yes,” they would answer, grinning. “She’s a wonder. You’re lucky.” The year passed. They tired of hotels. They bought an old house and twenty acres near the town of Marlowe, half an hour from Chicago; bought a little car, and moved out riotously with a pioneering hallucination that would have confounded Balboa. “Your room will be here!” they cried in turn. --And then: “And my room here!” “And the nursery here when we have children.” “And we’ll build a sleeping porch--oh, next year.” They moved out in April. In July Jeffrey’s closest friend, Harry Cromwell came to spend a week--they met him at the end of the long lawn and hurried him proudly to the house. Harry was married also. His wife had had a baby some six months before and was still recuperating at her mother’s in New York. Roxanne had gathered from Jeffrey that Harry’s wife was not as attractive as Harry--Jeffrey had met her once and considered her--“shallow.” But Harry had been married nearly two years and was apparently happy, so Jeffrey guessed that she was probably all right. “I’m making biscuits,” chattered Roxanne gravely. “Can your wife make biscuits? The cook is showing me how. I think every woman should know how to make biscuits. It sounds so utterly disarming. A woman who can make biscuits can surely do no----” “You’ll have to come out here and live,” said Jeffrey. “Get a place out in the country like us, for you and Kitty.” “You don’t know Kitty. She hates the country. She’s got to have her theatres and vaudevilles.” “Bring her out,” repeated Jeffrey. “We’ll have a colony. There’s an awfully nice crowd here already. Bring her out!” They were at the porch steps now and Roxanne made a brisk gesture toward a dilapidated structure on the right. “The garage,” she announced. “It will also be Jeffrey’s writing-room within the month. Meanwhile dinner is at seven. Meanwhile to that I will mix a cocktail.” The two men ascended to the second floor--that is, they ascended half-way, for at the first landing Jeffrey dropped his guest’s suitcase and in a cross between a query and a cry exclaimed: “For God’s sake, Harry, how do you like her?” “We will go up-stairs,” answered his guest, “and we will shut the door.”