“I want beautiful things about me,” she said; “but beauty that is so perishable as to be a constant care to the owner, or else to entail an army of servants, is a luxury which I think no rational being can afford. I shall have everything rich and strong and yet simple; there shall be no satin, gilded-legged chairs, no elaborate dust-catching carvings; no draperies and carpets that cannot bear the sun; but there shall be noble statues, pictures by great masters, luxurious rugs and divans, glorious color from jewelled windows and precious, many-hued marbles. I do not want a palace with dreary suites of high-studded rooms and frescoed ceilings, and I do not want a house that is nothing but a crowded museum of bric-à-brac, like so many I see. No; my house shall be a stately mansion with far-seeing towers and turrets, with cosy, low-studded rooms and wainscoted walls, with pillared arcades and richly carved stone balconies. All Spain and Venice and Nuremberg shall be studied for hints of beauty, and it shall be a home, a perfectly ideal American home; beautiful without and within; built to stand while generations come and go, graced by children, pets, and flowers, and the charming society of noble men and women.” Where this home was to be built had not yet been decided. Sometimes Mildred would in imagination place it on some smooth, green slope on the banks of the Hudson; sometimes among the elms on some hilltop overlooking the golden dome on Beacon Hill, with a glimpse of blue sea and white sails on the far horizon beyond. Of course I was to have the fun of helping to plan about it all, and Mildred was to bring home hosts of treasures from Europe after her sojourn abroad. But now, this morning, all this dream of the beauty that was to be had been ended by what Mildred had been saying. “I have settled one hundred thousand dollars on Ralph,” she had said, “for his own personal use. He would not accept any more, and I have decided to set apart for myself the same sum. The interest on two hundred thousand dollars ought, I think, to provide all the travel and luxuries that two reasonable mortals need; and the rest of the money which I had at first thought of spending on myself we are going to devote to several things, rather better worth doing than building a house, which not one in a hundred thousand could afford to maintain after we have gone.” “But, Mildred,” I expostulated, “you have always asserted that it was right to encourage art; that it was folly to refuse to buy a picture or a jewel just because there were still starving people in existence somewhere. I have heard you say repeatedly that money thus spent gave employment to labor, encouraged art, and”—