“It is a wonderful creation, and I told her so, but where in the dickens did she get the idea?”

“Don’t ask me. Did you happen to notice anything else?”

“No—only the violin. Sometimes I take my lesson in the parlour, sometimes in the [Pg 66]shop downstairs, or even in Herr Kaufmann’s bedroom, which opens off of it. When I come, he stops whatever he happens to be doing, sits down, and proceeds with my education.”

[Pg 66]

“On the floor,” said Iris reminiscently, “she has a gold jar which contains cat tails and grasses. It is Herr Kaufmann’s silk hat, which he used to have when he played in the famous orchestra, with the brim cut off and plenty of gold paint put on. The gilded potato-masher, with blue roses on it, which swings from the hanging lamp, was done by your humble servant. She has loved me ever since.”

“Iris!” exclaimed Lynn, reproachfully. “How could you!”

“How could I what?”

“Paint anything so outrageous as that?”

“My dear boy,” said Miss Temple, patronisingly, with her pretty head a little to one side, “you are young in the ways of the world. I was not achieving a work of art; I was merely giving pleasure to the Fräulein. Much trouble would be saved if people who undertake to give pleasure would consult the wishes of the recipient in preference to their own. Tastes differ, as even you may have observed. [Pg 67]Personally, I have no use for a gilded potato-masher—I couldn’t even live in the same house with one,—but I was pleasing her, not myself.”

[Pg 67]

“I wonder what I could do that would please her,” said Lynn, half to himself.

“Make her something out of nothing,” suggested Iris. “She would like that better than anything else. She has a wall basket made of a fish broiler, a chair that was once a barrel, a dresser which has been evolved from a packing box, a sofa that was primarily a cot, and a match box made from a tin cup covered with silk and gilded on the inside, not to mention heaps of other things.”

“Then what is left for me? The desirable things seem to have been used up.”

“Wait,” said Iris, “and I’ll show you.” She ran off gaily, humming a little song under her breath, and came back presently with a clothes-pin, a sheet 

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