"Fred, you are very good," she said. "It must have bothered you terribly to get all those things--you, who are so busy. Everything is lovely, and the latest and prettiest of its kind. You have shown exquisite taste, dear; but I feel as though I had badgered you into it, following as it does on top of the house and everything else." "No, dearest," I answered, stroking her hair. "I am proud of you--I am grateful to you. A man falls behind the times before he is aware of it. The world changes and paterfamilias ought to change with it out of consideration for his children. You were perfectly right, Josephine, just as you were right about the moving. Our house was too small and I was getting to look fusty and frowsy." "Not so bad as that, Fred. I never said that you didn't look perfectly clean and respectable. All I meant was that there are such pretty things now, it seems a pity not to wear them. It wasn't the fashion to wear them when you were young. I mean younger than you are now," she added, patting my cheek. "I am glad, Fred, that you are reconciled to the house. I know that I have been a thorn in your flesh for the last eighteen months on account of it. I didn't mean to be irritating about the moving, but I was, and my soul has been wearing sackcloth and ashes ever since because I was so nasty. You see, Fred, in the first place, though I pretended to be pleased at your selecting the house, I was really dreadfully disappointed, for half the fun of a new house is choosing it. Of course a new house chosen by some one else is better than none at all, but a woman hates surprises of that sort, and somehow my teeth were set on edge by the few things about the house that didn't suit me. And then, dear," she continued, caressingly, "I don't think it was very nice of me to meddle with your great-grandfather Plunkett's portrait. It was too much in the line of the people who have their ancestors painted to order. I think of it quite often at night and blush, which shows that I have a guilty conscience on the subject, though I can't help feeling that it has been very much improved whenever I look at it." "It was a very trifling amelioration," I answered. "And, if I remember rightly, it was I who put you up to it." "Yes, but you were only in jest, and I was base enough to adopt the idea and act upon it. No, Fred, though I agree that everything has worked out a great deal more satisfactorily than I deserve, and that we are infinitely better off than we have ever been before in point of comfort and general happiness, I look back on the last year and a half as a sort of nightmare. You were content to live along steadily in the dear old house and to toil unselfishly for us all, and I was perpetually prodding you. It has made me feel myself to be a perfect ogre of a woman. And yet it seemed to me to be necessary, Fred."