Produced by Mark C. Orton, Linda McKeown and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net THE ROSE-GARDEN HUSBAND BY MARGARET WIDDEMER WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY WALTER BIGGS NEW YORK GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS COPYRIGHT 1914, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY COPYRIGHT 1915, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY PUBLISHED, JANUARY 27, 1915 SECOND PRINTING, FEBRUARY 6, 1915 THIRD PRINTING, MARCH 12, 1915 FOURTH PRINTING, APRIL 23, 1915 FIFTH PRINTING, JUNE 10, 1915 SIXTH PRINTING, AUGUST 6, 1915 SEVENTH PRINTING, OCTOBER 21, 1915 EIGHTH PRINTING, MAY 1, 1916 NINTH PRINTING, OCTOBER 30, 1916 * * * * * [Illustration: "YOU KNOW, I MARRIED YOU PRINCIPALLY FOR A ROSE-GARDEN, AND THAT'S _LOVELY_!" _Page 172_] * * * * * IN LOVING MEMORY OF HOWARD TAYLOR WIDDEMER * * * * * THE ROSE-GARDEN HUSBAND I The Liberry Teacher lifted her eyes from a half-made catalogue-card, eyed the relentlessly slow clock and checked a long wriggle of purest, frankest weariness. Then she gave a furtive glance around to see if the children had noticed she was off guard; for if they had she knew the whole crowd might take more liberties than they ought to, and have to be spoken to by the janitor. He could do a great deal with them, because he understood their attitude to life, but that wasn't good for the Liberry Teacher's record. It was four o'clock of a stickily wet Saturday. As long as it is anything from Monday to Friday the average library attendant goes around thanking her stars she isn't a school-teacher; but the last day of the week, when the rest of the world is having its relaxing Saturday off and coming to gloat over you as it acquires its Sunday-reading best seller, if you work in a library you begin just at noon to wish devoutly that you'd taken up scrubbing-by-the-day, or hack-driving, or porch-climbing or--anything on earth that gave you a weekly half-holiday! So the Liberry Teacher braced herself severely, and put on her reading-glasses with a view to looking older and more firm. "Liberry Teacher," it might be well to explain, was not her official title. Her description on the pay-roll ran "Assistant for the Children's Department, Greenway Branch, City Public Library." Grown-up people, when she happened to run across them, called her Miss Braithwaite. But "Liberry Teacher" was the only name the children ever used, and she saw scarcely anybody but the children, six days a week, fifty-one weeks a year. As for her real name, that nobody ever called her by, _that_ was Phyllis Narcissa.