So Steve received the letter announcing the plans a few days later. It was a semi-patronizing, semi-affectionate letter with a great many underlined words and superlative adjectives and intended to convey the impression that he was a mighty lucky chap to have married a fairy princess who would spend her ducats in rigging up an uncomfortable moth-eaten villa of the days of kingdom come. As he finished it Gay appeared, having received a letter telling him to hurry ahead with the plans and contracts. Gay was rather obsequious in his manner since he did not know whether it was Steve or Beatrice who was to pay for this transformation. "If my wife insists, go ahead--but don't move your arts-and-crafts shop into my office. I'm not enough interested to see designs and so on. I never had time to be one of the leisure class, and I'm too old to be kidded into thinking I'm one of them now. But I did make a mistake," he added, slowly, whether for Gay's benefit or not no one could tell--"I thought the world owed me more than a living--that it owed me a bargain. And there never was a bargain cheaply won that didn't prove a white elephant in time." Gay's one-cylinder brain did not follow the intricacies of the statement. He merely thought of Steve in more than usually profane terms--and concluded that Beatrice was paying the bill. CHAPTER XI It was April before Steve found himself visiting with Mary Faithful again and admiring as heartily as Luke had admired the new apartment Mary had chosen for her family. It had, to Steve's mind, the same delightful air of freedom and attractive shabbiness that he had come to consider as essential for a true home. While Beatrice was launched on her new object in life--making the house into a villa, from upholstering a gondola in sky-blue satin and expecting people to use it as a sofa to having the walls frescoed with fat, pouting cherubs--Mary had selected funny old chairs and soft shades of blue cretonne found in the remnant department, queer pottery, Indian blankets, and a set of blue dishes which just naturally demanded to be heaped with good things and eaten before an open fire at Sunday-night supper. The whole expense came within Mary's economical pocketbook, yet it seemed to Steve to have the combined richness of a Persian palace and the geniality of a nursery on Christmas Eve.