"Haven't a plate--or a stein. Baby has a silver mug. Would that do?" Cathcart smiled in a superior way. "You had a lot of mighty fine stuff in your Yale days," he remarked. "Pity you let it all go." "I shouldn't have cared for that truck now," Anthony declared easily, though he deceived nobody by it. Most of them remembered, if Cathcart had forgotten, how the college boy had sacrificed all his treasures at a blow when the news of his family's misfortunes had come. It had yielded little enough, after all, to throw into the abyss of their sudden poverty, but the act had proved the spirit of the elder son of the house. "You certainly will want plenty of rugs and hangings of the right sort," Cathcart pursued. Anthony looked at him good-humouredly. "I can see that you have got to be suppressed," he said, with a hand on Stevens's collar. "I can tell you in a breath just what's going into this room at present. The floor is to have a matting, one of those heavy, cloth-like mattings. Auntie Dingley has presented me with one fine old Persian rug from the Marcy library, which she insists is out of key with the rest of the stuff. I'm glad it is--it'll furnish the key to my decorations. Then I've a splendid old desk I picked up in a place where they temporarily forgot themselves in setting a price on it. That's going by the window. I've a little Duerer engraving, and a few good foreign photographs Juliet has put under glass for me. For the rest I have--what I like best--clear space, pipe-and-hearth room, the bamboo chairs off the porch with some winter cushions in, my books--and that." He pointed to the windows, outside which lay a long country vista stretching away over fields and river to the woods in the distance, turning rich autumn tints now under the late October frosts. "It's enough," said Carey, with the suppressed sigh which usually accompanied any allusion of his to Anthony's environment. "Dens are too stuffy, as a rule. Fellows try to see how much useless lumber they can accumulate in altogether inadequate space." "But you ought to have a couch," said Judith. "Oh, yes, I'm going to have a couch," assented Anthony, laughing across her head at Juliet. "A gem of a couch--we're making it ourselves. You're not to see it till it's done. It'll be no brickbat couch, either--it'll be a flowery bed of ease--or, if not flowery, invitingly covered with some stunning stuff Juliet has fished out of a neighbour's attic." "Now, come and see the nursery," Juliet proposed, and the party crowded through the door into the living-room, around to the one by its side which opened into an attractive room behind the den, all air and sunshine. "I refuse to suggest," said Cathcart instantly, "the decorations for this place." "That's good," remarked Anthony cheerfully. "So much verbiage out of the way." "It'll be pink and white, I suppose," said Judith. "Pink is the colour for boys, I'm told."