I felt enough confidence in the scheme to risk a year’s leave, and I now settled down to my writing zestfully. I had already submitted three stories, which had been accepted in a cordial spirit that proved highly stimulating to further endeavor, and the first of the series, called _The Lords of the Round House_--a sketch of the domestic relationships and social conditions of the people living near the railroad shops--had been commented on favorably as a fresh and novel view of an old subject. My second study dealt with a settlement sustained by the canning industry, and under the title, _Eros and the Peach Crop_, I had described the labors and recreations of this community honestly, and yet with a degree of humor. As a bachelor professor I had been boarding near the college with the widow of a minister; but now that I was giving my time wholly to writing I found this domicile intolerable. My landlady, admirable woman though she was, was altogether too prone to knock at my door on trifling errands. When I had filled my note-book with memoranda for a sketch dealing with the boarding-house evil (it has lately appeared as _Charging What the Onion Will Bear_), I resolved to find lodgings elsewhere. And besides, the assistant professor of natural sciences occupied a room adjoining mine, and the visits of strange _reptilia_ to my quarters were far from stimulating to literary labor. I had long been immensely curious as to those young and trusting souls who wed in the twenties, establish homes, and, unterrified by cruel laws enacted for the protection of confiding creditors, buy homes on the instalment plan, keep a cow, carry life insurance, buy theatre tickets, maintain a baby, and fit as snugly into the social structure as though the world were made for them alone. In my tramps about the city I had marked with professional interest the appearance of great colonies of bungalows which had risen within a few years, and which spoke with an appealing eloquence for an obstinate confidence in the marriage tie. In my late afternoon excursions through these sprightly suburban regions I had gazed with the frankest admiration upon wholly charming young persons stepping blithely along new cement walks, equipped with the neatest of card-cases, or bearing embroidered bags of sewing; and maids in the smartest of caps opened doors to them. Through windows guarded by the whitest of draperies, I had caught glimpses of our native forests as transformed into the sturdiest of arts-and-crafts furniture. Both flower and kitchen gardens were squeezed into compact plots of earth; a Gerald or a Geraldine cooed from a perambulator at the gate of at least every other establishment; and a “syndicate” man-of-all-work moved serenely from furnace to furnace, from lawn to lawn, as the season determined. On Sundays I saw the young husbands hieing to church, to a golf-links somewhere, to tennis in some vacant lot, or aiding their girlish wives in the cheerfulest fashion