men--especially for men who are striving for careers--that women are bred to feebleness of purpose and much prefer being loved to loving, being admired to admiring. His long stay abroad and his success there had touched his Americanism only to idealize it. The dream of his life continued to be building a career at home. He was too able to be given to the fatuities of optimism. He had no delusions on the subject of the difficulties that would confront and assail him. He had observed that those Americans who had the money to buy pictures usually lacked the breadth to appreciate their own country, considered it “crude and commercial,” whatever that might mean, and preferred foreign painters and foreign subjects. But, like many another American artist of ability, he longed to have a personal share in bringing about the change toward national pride and confidence that must come sooner or later. So, when his aunt left him a competence, he felt free to engage in the hazardous American adventure. Two months after he inherited his little fortune he landed in New York with his Paris career a closed incident; a few days later he was installed in the old farmhouse on the edge of his wilderness estate and within a mile of the post office and railway station at Deer Spring. On a hill near the Lake Wauchong end of his estate--a hill that seemed a knoll in comparison with the steeps encompassing it on all sides--he got the village carpenter hastily to build for him a house of one large and lofty room, admitting light freely by way of big windows in the walls and an enormous skylight in the roof. Such small impression as his return made was wholly confined to his native Deer Spring. There the gossip went that, having failed to make art pay, he had come back home to “laze round” and live off his aunt’s money. As he had the doing sort of man’s aversion to discussing his plans, such of the villagers as succeeded in drawing him into lengthier parley than polite exchange of greetings heard nothing that contradicted the gossip. Toward the end of an April afternoon, not long after the studio was finished, Roger reached it in the midst of a tremendous storm of rain and wind. Just before he gained the shelter of the north wall a swooping gust blew into his face a heavy cloud of wood smoke; so when he strode in he was not altogether unprepared for the sight that met his eyes as he dashed the water and smoke out of them. A fire had been built with generous hands in the fireplace in the south wall. Upon the long, low bench parallel with the outer edge of the broad hearth lay the intruder who had doubtless sought the one refuge within a radius of a mile when the storm came on suddenly about half an hour before. Roger had assumed he would find a man; but he was not much surprised to see that it was a woman for whom his roof was doing this good turn. As he divested himself of dripping hat and water-proof he said genially: “I’m glad you made yourself at home!”