"Escritoire?--Escritoire?" worried the White Linen Nurse. "Why--why--I'm afraid I must have mislaid it." "Mislaid it?" thundered the Senior Surgeon. "Mislaid it? It weighed three hundred pounds!" "Oh, it did?" questioned the White Linen Nurse with great, blue-eyed interest. Still mulling apparently over the fascinating weight of the escritoire she climbed up suddenly into a chair and with the fluffy broom-shaped end of her extraordinarily long braid of hair went angling wildy off into space after an illusive cobweb. Faster and faster the Senior Surgeon's temper began to search for a new point of exit. "What do you suppose the--servants think of you?" he stormed. "Running round like that with your hair in a pig-tail like a--kid?" "Servants?" cooed the White Linen Nurse. "Servants?" Very quietly she jumped down from the chair and came and stood looking up into the Senior Surgeon's hectic face. "Why, there aren't any servants," she explained patiently. "I've dismissed every one of them. We're doing our own work now!" "Doing 'our own work'?" gasped the Senior Surgeon. Quite worriedly the White Linen Nurse stepped back a little. "Why, wasn't that right?" she pleaded. "Wasn't it right? Why, I thought people always did their own work when they were first married!" With sudden apprehensiveness she glanced round over her shoulder at the hall clock, and darting out through a side door, returned almost instantly with a fierce-looking knife. "I'm so late now and everything," she confided. "Could you peel the potatoes for me?" "No, I couldn't!" said the Senior Surgeon shortly. Equally shortly he turned on his heel, and reaching out once more for his rod-case and grip went on up the stairs to his own room. One of the pleasantest things about arriving home very late in the afternoon is the excuse it gives you for loafing in your own room while other people are getting supper. No existent domestic sound in the whole twenty-four hours is as soothing at the end of a long journey as the sound of other people getting supper. Stretched out full length in a big easy chair by his bed-room window, with his favorite pipe bubbling rhythmically between his gleaming white teeth, the Senior Surgeon studied his new "solid gold bed" and his new sage green wall-paper and his new dust-colored rug, to the faint, far-away accompaniment of soft thudding feet, and a girl's laugh, and a child's prattle, and the tink-tink-tinkle of glass,--china,--silver,--all scurrying consciously to the service of one man,--and that man,--_himself_. Very, very slowly, in that special half hour an inscrutable little smile printed itself experimentally across the right hand corner of the Senior Surgeon's upper lip.