"I have a feeling, a presentiment," she said, in a tone of fervent conviction, "that if we make up our minds hard enough it will become possible. We've been talking about this for years, and I never felt until this moment that it was really going to be true." For a moment her calm certainty influenced my hopes, then I shook my head doubtfully. "You forget," I rejoined, "that there's no other opening in sight, and as long as I'm doing 'Music and Drama' for the _Observer_ I must stay in the city. If I had regular hours, if I were a bank clerk, for instance, we might live in the suburbs, but----" "We've been over all that hundreds of times," she interrupted, "and you know that if you had been a bank clerk I wouldn't have married you. You're not going to give up journalism, but I'm sure something will happen to let us live where we want to live. And as for the suburbs, it seems to me it would be better to get a real farm in the real country. If we could find a good comfortable farm-house near the railroad with plenty of land around it, I don't believe it would cost us any more than one of those flimsy cottages with a garden plot attached that we looked at last year." I found, as we talked the matter over, that Marion's imagination had been fired by the idea of some quaint old-fashioned homestead with gabled roof, open fireplaces and latticed windows, surrounded by ancient shade-trees and a straggling apple-orchard. All these accessories I could appreciate, and, in comparison, an ordinary suburban cottage, one of many others exactly alike, began to seem quite out of the question. There were delightful possibilities about buying a real farm, not to mention the inviting prospect of running it afterward. "That's a capital idea!" I exclaimed, in eager approval. "I could raise a couple of hundred dollars to make the first payment, then we could give a mortgage for the balance and pay it off with the proceeds of the first year's crop. Then we could soon make enough money to----" I stopped short, for I became aware that my wife was regarding me with a smile of loving toleration. "There you are again, Henry," she said, with a merry laugh. "What a lot of money we'd save if I let you carry out a few of your wild schemes! We're not going to raise one dollar to make a first payment; we're not going to give a mortgage, so you'll not be able to pay it off with the first year's crop." "But it was your proposal," I protested, "you said----" "I didn't say we might _buy_ a farm, but I think we might be able to rent one for less than we pay for this house, and I'm sure we can live more cheaply in the country than in the city, if we make up our minds not to spend money needlessly." It didn't seem to me that a rented farm without a mortgage could be as attractive as the one I had imagined, but I reluctantly admitted that Marion's plan might be more economical than mine. If I hadn't done so she certainly would have reminded me of some of my errors of judgment.