“I did not do it. I have learned something,” she said, off her guard for the first time, following his eyes about this room as if she accompanied his thoughts. “What have you learned?” he asked, smiling. “To buy what I want--not mere things, but taste in the choice of these things. It is for sale, like any other commodity.” He laughed, with an appreciative glint of the eye. “For so long I did not know that taste is the one thing most people have not got. They only look as if they had it, when in fact they have purchased it. You buy it from your tailor. The woman whose clothes please you pays the modiste who makes them much more for her taste than for her work. You can buy any kind of taste, good, bad or indifferent; but nearly everybody buys it.” What she said was not interesting; but he was interested that she could think it; it showed that she had a mind, which he had doubted. He hoped she would not develop too much along this line. The perfect woman, in his opinion, should have loveliness, health, and only a rudimentary intelligence. He was very tired, indeed, of the rhinestone sparkle of feminine wit. “It is the same with the building and furnishing of a house,” Helen showed up again. “They hire an architect and a decorator. And then they hire a landscape gardener. And when the whole scene inside and out is laid, they live in it as if they had planned it and achieved it. But they have bought every line, every shadow, and all the perspective--things that you feel and see, but cannot touch. It is not the house, but the idea it suggests for which you pay most. I had my own ideas, but I employed professionals to produce them. This is what I have learned,” she concluded, “not to cobble my own ideas. I simply told those men what I wanted.” “I should have liked to hear your instructions,” he said. “They were short. I told the architect that I wanted an honorable looking house, not a grand one.” He nodded, appreciatively, and waited. Some subtle change had taken place in her mind toward him during this last moment. There was a compelling power in her expression, as if now she wished to hold his attention. She had a purpose. He became uneasy and curious. “And I told the man who was to choose the furniture and do the inside decorations that I wanted a home, a mild kind of place with some sadness in it, like the heart of a mother; and rifts of brightness in it, like the face of a mother when she smiles; and everything very fine to honor her, the mother, you understand, in the eyes of her children.”