"You _know_ what I want a house for--a house that shall be a home for you and for me, and where, in the soft light of dim, quiet rooms, I shall sit by you and talk and listen while time slips on. Do you remember how the time used to fly when we were together? It seemed always as if some one must be turning the clock ahead for a joke. I am going to make a picture some day of two Lovers, and on the mantel above them Cupid laughing and turning up the clock-hands. We will make that picture together next year, for you will slip in and look over my shoulder, and you will take the pen or the brush and touch here and there; and the editors will like my pictures better because of those touches; and when they are printed in the books and papers I will sit dreaming over my own work because it will not be all mine, but part Dorry's, too. "I have never told Perny and Van anything about you, because I have never quite found the opportunity to do it in the way I would like. But I think sometimes they suspect, for the other day, when we went out to look at houses, Perny said he didn't suppose I'd want my house very close to two old hardened sinners like them. Then we came to a vacant lot that was just about large enough for three houses, and I said we wouldn't buy houses at all, but would buy the lot and build there side by side and just to suit us. And I said we would have our studios on the same floor of each, and opening through into each other as they do now, and that Perny's should be between, because we both illustrate his work sometimes, and that then we would be able to hire editors to run the 'Whole Family,' and we would work at the kind of work we liked to do and at no other. And I said that evenings we would sit together and talk just as we do now, and you would be there, too--though, of course, I didn't say that, but I know they understood and liked it, and you would like it too, sweetheart, for you have said so.