They came back in the dusk, talking of painting and papering and the laying out of the garden. Ellen was anxious that the garden should be nice, and he had been much interested in the old family furniture at Laurel Hill, not with the spindle-legged Sheraton sideboard, but with the big Victorian furniture which the Cronins thought ugly. He liked especially the black mahogany sideboard in the dining-room, and he was enthusiastic about the four-post bed that Mr. Cronin had slept in for thirty years without ever thinking it was a beautiful thing. This massive furniture represented a life that Ned perceived for the first time, a sedate monotonous life; and he could see these people accomplishing the same tasks from daylight to dark; he admired the well-defined circle of their interests and the calm security with which they spoke of the same things every evening, deepening the tradition of their country and of their own characters; and he conceived a sudden passion for tradition, and felt he would like to settle down in these grass lands in an eighteenth-century house, living always amid heavy mahogany furniture, sleeping every night in a mahogany four-post bed: and he could not help thinking that if he did not get the mahogany four-post bed with the carved top, perhaps he would not care to marry Ellen at all. The next time he saw her their talk turned upon the house she had found for him, and she said if he did not take it he would certainly go back to America in the spring. She forgot herself a little; her father had to check her, and Ned returned home sure in his mind that she would marry him--if he asked her. And the next day he chose a pair of trousers that he thought becoming--they were cut wide in the leg and narrow over the instep. He looked out for a cravat that she had not seen him wear, and he chose the largest, and he put on his braided coat. He could not see that his moustache was not in keeping with his clothes: he had often intended to shave it, but to-day was not the day for shaving. She had liked his moustache, and he thought it would be a pity she should not enjoy it, however reprehensible her taste for it might be. And he pondered his side-whiskers, remembering they were in keeping with his costume (larger whiskers would be still more in keeping), and amused by his own fantastic notions, he thought he was beginning to look like the gentleman of seventy or eighty years ago that he had seen in varnished maplewood frames in the drawing-room at the Cronins'. His trousers were of a later period, but they were, nevertheless, contemporaneous with the period of the mahogany sideboard, and that was what he liked best.