It seems to me you must spend a great deal of time over that Ornaby thing. Is it really so beautifully interesting as you say it is? Of course I do understand you’re immensely keen on it though, and I’m glad it will be such a great success and all that. I certainly hope it will because as I warned you I’m an extravagant little wretch and always in a row with papa about it. But I do hope you don’t feel you’ll have to spend lots of time out there after we’re married. Of course we must be as practical—disgusting word!—as we can, but I do hope you’ll arrange so that you won’t need to do more out West than just oversee this Ornaby affair for a week or so every year, because I adore you and I’ll want you to be with me all the time. Cousin Oliver has some works—I don’t know what it is they make but I think it’s metal things for plumbers or something equally heinous!—and _his_ works are out in the West somewhere, too. He only has to go there once or twice a year and gets home again the next night. I do hope you’ll be sure to make arrangements like that about yours. At any rate, be sure not to have to go out there _next_ year, not unless you just hate your poor Me! I couldn’t bear for anything to interfere with our having a full year abroad. I won’t let you leave me in Nice or Mentone and run back to your old Ornaby thing for weeks and weeks! If you dare to try anything like that, sir, I’ll flirt my little head off with some dashing maître d’hôtel! Write instantly and tell me nothing shall spoil our full year abroad together. Instantly! Or I’ll think you hate me! This letter gave Dan a bad hour as he sat in his room at home trying to construct a reply to it. The full year abroad now considered so definite by Lena had been rather sketchily mentioned between them in New York; he had agreed, with a faint and concealed uneasiness, that a wedding journey to southern France, if he could “manage” it, would be lovely; but afterwards he had forgotten all about it; and, being in his twenties, he was yet to learn how often the casual implications of men in their tender moments are construed by women to be attested bonds, sworn to, signed and sealed. So now, as he answered Lena, he found himself on the defensive, as if the impossibility of the full year abroad were a wrong to her, an unintended one, but nevertheless a wrong for him to explain and for her to forgive. He added to his opening explanations: