"I _am_ late now," he told her, with his good-humored insistence on facts. "I've missed the 7:40, and I've just time to catch the next one if I hurry. Do you happen to know, dear, where I put that catalogue from Elberstrom and Company? The big red book with the picture of a dynamo on the cover. I was looking over it last night, and Heaven knows where I may have dropped it." The opinion as to the proper answer to a speech like this was one of the sharply marked lines of divergence between Madeleine Lowder and her brother's wife. "Soak him one when you get a chance, Lydia," she was wont to urge facetiously, and her advice in the present case would unhesitatingly have been to answer as acrimoniously as possible that if he were more regular in the way he handled such things his wife would have to spend less time ransacking the house looking for them. But in spite of such practical and experienced counsel, Lydia was scarcely conscious of refraining from the entirely justifiable and entirely futile customary recriminations, and she was as unaware as Paul of the vast amount of embittering domestic friction which was spared them by her silence. She had some great natural advantages for the task of creating a better domestic life at which she was now so eagerly setting herself, and one of them was this incapacity to resent petty injustices done to herself. She was handicapped in any effort by her utter lack of intellectual training and by a natural tendency to mental confusion, but her lack of small vanities not only spared her untold suffering, but added much to her singleness of aim. She now went about searching for the catalogue, finally finding it in the library under the couch. When she came back to the dining-room she saw Paul standing up by the table, wiping his mouth. Evidently he was ready to start. How absurd she had been to think of talking seriously to him in the morning! "Mary brought your breakfast in," he said nodding toward an untidy tray. "I hate to seem to be finding fault all the time, but really her breath was enough to set the house on fire! Can't you keep her down to moderate drinking?" "I'll try," said Lydia. Paul took the catalogue from her hand and reached for his hat. They were in the hall now. "Good-by, Honey," he said, kissing her hastily and darting out of the house. Lydia had but just turned back to the dining-room when he opened the door and came in again, bringing a gust of fresh winter air with him. "Say, dear, you forgot about something you wanted to tell me about. I've got eight minutes before the trolley, so now's your chance. What is it? Something about the plumbing?"