“Don't be absurd,” I was admonished. “Just compare the size of the largest bedroom in that last flat we had in One Hundred and Tenth Street with the size of the smallest bedroom we expect to have in the new place. Why, you could put the biggest bedroom we had there into the smallest bedroom we are going to have here and lose it! And then think of the halls we must furnish and the living room and the breakfast porch and everything. Did we have a breakfast porch in the flat? We did not! Did we have a living room forty feet one way and twenty-eight the other? We did not! Did we have a dining room in that flat that was big enough to swing a cat in?” “We didn't have any cat.” “All the same, we--” “I doubt whether any of the neighbors would have loaned us a cat just for that purpose.” I felt I had the upper hand and I meant to keep it. “Besides, you know I don't like cats. What is the use of importing foreign matters such as cats--and purely problematical cats at that--into a discussion about something else? What relation does a cat bear to furniture, I ask you? Still, speaking of cats, I'm reminded--” “Never mind trying to be funny. And never mind trying to steer the conversation off the right track either. Please pay attention to what I am saying--let's see, where was I? Oh, yes: Did we have a hall in that flat worthy to be dignified by the name of a hall? We did not! We had a passageway--that's what it was--a passageway. Now there is a difference between furnishing a mere passageway and a regular hall, as you are about to discover before you are many months older.” On second thought I had to concede there was something in what had just been said. One could not have swung one's cat in our dining room in the flat with any expectation of doing the cat any real good. And the hallway we had in our flat was like nearly all halls in New York flats. It was comfortably filled when you hung a water-color picture up on its wall and uncomfortably crowded if you put a clarionet in the corner. It would have been bad luck to open an umbrella anywhere in our flat--bad luck for the umbrella if for nothing else. Despite its enormous capacity for inhaling furniture it had been, when you came right down to cases, a form-fitting fiat. So mentally confessing myself worsted at this angle of the controversy, I fell back on my original argument that certainly it would be years and years and it might be forever before we possibly could expect--at the current rate of speed of the building operations, or speaking exactly, at the current rate of the lack of speed--to move in. “But the architect has promised us on his solemn word of honor--”