Transcribed from the 1909 Bernhard Tauchnitz edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org THEY AND I * * * * * BY JEROME K. JEROME AUTHOR OF “THE IDLE THOUGHTS OF AN IDLE FELLOW,” “THREE MEN ON THE BUMMEL,” “PAUL KELVER,” ETC. * * * * * _COPYRIGHT EDITION_ * * * * * LEIPZIG BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ 1909. CHAPTER I “IT is not a large house,” I said. “We don’t want a large house. Two spare bedrooms, and the little three-cornered place you see marked there on the plan, next to the bathroom, and which will just do for a bachelor, will be all we shall require—at all events, for the present. Later on, if I ever get rich, we can throw out a wing. The kitchen I shall have to break to your mother gently. Whatever the original architect could have been thinking of—” “Never mind the kitchen,” said Dick: “what about the billiard-room?” The way children nowadays will interrupt a parent is nothing short of a national disgrace. I also wish Dick would not sit on the table, swinging his legs. It is not respectful. “Why, when I was a boy,” as I said to him, “I should as soon have thought of sitting on a table, interrupting my father—” “What’s this thing in the middle of the hall, that looks like a grating?” demanded Robina. “She means the stairs,” explained Dick. “Then why don’t they look like stairs?” commented Robina. “They do,” replied Dick, “to people with sense.” “They don’t,” persisted Robina, “they look like a grating.” Robina, with the plan spread out across her knee, was sitting balanced on the arm of an easy-chair. Really, I hardly see the use of buying chairs for these people. Nobody seems to know what they are for—except it be one or another of the dogs. Perches are all they want. “If we threw the drawing-room into the hall and could do away with the stairs,” thought Robina, “we should be able to give a dance now and then.” “Perhaps,” I suggested, “you would like to clear out the house altogether, leaving nothing but the four bare walls. That would give us still more room, that would. For just living in, we could fix up a shed in the garden; or—” “I’m talking seriously,” said Robina: “what’s the good of a drawing-room? One only wants it to show the sort of people into that one wishes hadn’t come. They’d sit about, looking miserable, just as well anywhere else. If we could only get rid of the stairs—”