"But won’t it be awkward," I ventured in mild speculation, "if after we are married we have to stay at an hotel together, or share a cabin on a ship—to be Miss Bayard and Mr. Byrd?" "Don’t be absurd, Ranny," retorted Gertrude, with her usual introductory phrase. "Awkward or not, do you think I should give up my name that I have lived under all my life, fought for and established?" "Of course not," I hastily apologized. "I hadn’t thought of that." I could not help wondering what she meant by having established her name. Except as regards one or two committees and vacation funds Gertrude’s name is unknown to celebrity. "You with your H.H.," she ran on briskly, with the triumph of having scored. "Surely you don’t want to cling to the musty old formulas?" "No, certainly not," I answered her readily. I am no match for Gertrude in argument. Of a sudden I became aware that despite the hissing fire in the grate there was no sparkle in the air this chill November afternoon. The H.H. to which Gertrude had alluded was the only thing resembling an emotion that betrayed any sign of smoldering life within me in that discussion of ours touching matrimony. The H.H., I would better explain, stands for Horror of Home—for my profound repugnance toward anything resembling the fettering bonds of domesticity. A man, I feel, should be as free to do what he pleases and to go where he likes when and if married as when single. Otherwise who would assume the chains and slavery of that shadowed prison-house? To-morrow, my heart suddenly tells me, I must be off upon a journey of unknown duration. Once again I would see the estraded gardens of the Riviera, the olive groves of Italy, the sacred parchments and incunabula of the Laurentian Library in Florence. I would wander anew in the wilderness of the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris and on the left bank of the Seine, where once I collected the lore of Balzac and of Sainte-Beuve. And who dare prevent my setting off at a moment’s notice for the ill-lighted rotunda of the British Museum or the cloister precincts of the Bodleian at Oxford? Even as Gertrude was speaking, I experienced an irresistible longing for all those places, for the turf walks and pleached alleys of Oxford and the beautiful "Backs" of the Cambridge Colleges. There is a manuscript at Trinity that I must see again, and I have long promised myself a month in Pepys’s old library at Magdelene in Cambridge. But Gertrude is not like other women. "What I like about you, Ranny," she remarked, flicking the ash from her cigarette with unerring aim into the hearth, "is your reasonableness. You hate as I do to see two people handcuffed together like a pair of convicts for life. Might as well go back to the Stone Age or to the times of a dozen children in the house and the mother grilling herself all day before the kitchen fire. Ugh!" and she gave a shudder. "No fear of that with you," I laughed. "No, I should hope not," she puffed energetically.