Mr. Brumley gave one wild glance at the board, but indeed there was not a word to be said in its mitigation. It was the crude advertisement of a crude pretentious thing crudely sold. “My dear lady!” he said in his largest style, “I am desolated! But I have said it! It isn’t a pretty board.” A memory of epithets pricked him. “You must forgive—a certain touch of—rhetoric.” He turned about as if to dismiss the board altogether, but she remained with her brows very faintly knit, surveying the cause of his offence. “It isn’t a _pretty_ board,” she said. “I’ve wondered at times.... It isn’t.” “I implore you to forget that outbreak—mere petulance—because, I suppose, of a peculiar liking for that particular view. There are—associations——” “I’ve wondered lately,” she continued, holding on to her own thoughts, “what people _did_ think of them. And it’s curious—to hear——” For a moment neither spoke, she surveyed the board and he the tall ease of her pose. And he was thinking she must surely be the most beautiful woman he had ever encountered. The whole country might be covered with boards if it gave us such women as this. He felt the urgent need of some phrase, to pull the situation out of this pit into which it had fallen. He was a little unready, his faculties all as it were neglecting his needs and crowding to the windows to stare, and meanwhile she spoke again, with something of the frankness of one who thinks aloud. “You see,” she said, “one _doesn’t_ hear. One thinks perhaps——And there it is. When one marries very young one is apt to take so much for granted. And afterwards——” She was wonderfully expressive in her inexpressiveness, he thought, but found as yet no saving phrase. Her thought continued to drop from her. “One sees them so much that at last one doesn’t see them.” She turned away to survey the little house again; it was visible in bright strips between the red-scarred pine stems. She looked at it chin up, with a still approval—but she was the slenderest loveliness, and with such a dignity!—and she spoke at length as though the board had never existed. “It’s like a little piece of another world; so bright and so—perfect.” There was the phantom of a sigh in her voice. “I think you’ll be charmed by our rockery,” he said. “It was one of our particular efforts. Every time we two went abroad we came back with something, stonecrop or Alpine or some little bulb from the wayside.” “How can you leave it!” He was leaving it because it bored him to death. But so intricate is the human mind that it was with perfect sincerity he answered: “It will be a tremendous wrench.... I have to go.” “And you’ve written most of your books here and lived here!”