+--------------------------------+ | | | | | MISS OLIVE MANDERSON | | | | 44 LANDOR LANE | +--------------------------------+ I throw this to the realists that they may chortle over it in the way of their grim fraternity. Were I cursed with the least taint of romanticism I should not disclose her maiden state at this point, but hold it for stirring dramatic use at the moment when, believing her to be the wife of the mournful tile-grate man, I should bid her good-by and vanish forever. The moment that card reached me by the hand of her housemaid she was playing a Chopin polonaise, and I was across the lane and reverently waiting at the door when the last chord sounded. It was late on an afternoon at the threshold of October, but not too cool for tea _al fresco_. When the wind blew chill from the lake she disappeared, and returned with her hands thrust into the pockets of a white sweater. It was amazing how well we got on from the first. She explained herself in the fewest words. Her brother’s wife had died two years before, and she had helped to establish a home for him in the hope of mitigating his loneliness. She spoke of him and the child with the tenderest consideration. He had been badly broken by his wife’s death, and was given to brooding. I accused myself bitterly for having so grossly misjudged him as to think him capable of harshness toward the fair lady of his bungalow. He came while I still sat there and greeted me amiably, and when I left we were established on the most neighborly footing. Thenceforth my work prospered. Olive revealed, with the nicest appreciation and understanding of my needs, the joys and sorrows of suburban bungalowhood. The deficiencies of the trolley service, the uncertainties of the grocer’s delivery she described in the aptest phrases, her buoyant spirit making light of all such vexations. The manifold resources and subterfuges of bungalow housekeeping were unfolded with the drollest humor. The eternal procession of cooks, the lapses of the neighborhood hired man, the fitfulness of the electric light--all such tragedies were illuminated with her cheery philosophy. The magazine article that I had planned expanded into a discerning study of the secret which had baffled and lured me, as to the flowering of the bungalow upon the rough edges of the urban world. The aspirations expressed by the upright piano, the perambulator, the new book on the arts-and-crafts table, the card-case borne through innumerable quiet lanes--all such phenomena Olive elucidated for my instruction. The shrewd economies that explained the occasional theatre tickets; the incubator that robbed the grocer to pay the milliner; the home-plied needle that accounted for the succession of crisp shirt waists--into these and many other mysteries Olive initiated me.