The eye of an efficient organizer would have no doubt noted that the marriage of Grace had left Nina with a good-sized double bedroom, undisputed. Obviously, there was room for either Ursula or Lottie with her. And it seemed irrelevant, too, that Ursula’s bedroom should be adjacent to Aunt Lavvy’s; the three boys, Hal, Bunny and William, could have shared the attic, and revelled in it--attics are suitable things for boys. Then their “den,” which was also William’s room, could have been Miss Roberts’ private bedroom, always presuming that governesses have need of privacy, and that Lottie slept with Nina. An alternative grouping would have been Nina and Ursula to share Nina’s room; Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell to have retained their own bedroom, with the room leading out of it to replace Mrs. Maxwell’s sitting-room; the latter to be Aunt Lavvy’s bedroom, with Grace and Stanley in the spare-room. And the most normal and convenient solution would have eliminated Aunt Lavvy, and sent Grace and Stanley and their paraphernalia of Nurse and babies, to a home of their own. But the existing arrangement was not one instantaneous and successful reconstruction after one instantaneous cataclysm; but the result of gradual changes, haphazard shifts and displacements ... and it built itself up on the assumption that nobody minded anything, and that, in the Maxwell scheme of things, a sense of property in space simply did not exist. As long as chaos was bound about by four outer walls of home, the squanderings and overlappings within did not matter. Almost every room had its double uses, except Father’s study, which alone remained aloof from any sudden bewitchment or transformation. Father did not study, but he had to have his study, because he was Father.... It was sacred ground--and if not held sacred, profane. But the drawing-room, which also held the telephone and the piano, was common ground for all, as well as cold storage for unwanted callers. Stanley, in the evenings, conducted his “researches” in the dining-room; Ursula and Lottie had their morning lessons in the nursery, while the babies were out; Hal and Bunny developed photographs in William’s bedroom. When Nina was away visiting, they temporarily turned her bedroom into a guest-room. Mrs. Maxwell, of course, had the whole house. Had the Laburnums a personality and a life of its own, you can imagine it with adenoids, and breathing heavily from the chest--that laboured bronchial breathing which forebodes trouble.... [IV] AFTER Hal had gone out with Aunt Lavvy’s cheque, the house and garden became slumbrous.... It was September, that mercurial month of the year which at one moment raises a sigh for fires in the listless grates, and at one moment is rich with excitement of high winds and burning blue skies, and boughs that with every creak and sway fling treasure to the ground.