country. Duty is Marion's strong point; mine also, in a sort of second-hand way, for I have learned to obey the dictates of her conscience with an amazing alacrity. With her, the principle involved in the most trivial act is a matter of vital importance, while I am inclined to act first, and from that action deduce a principle to justify the course I have taken. Her mind is [Pg 5]intensely analytical, and she believes rigidly what she ought to believe; I am, perhaps, a trifle more imaginative, more easily swayed by passing enthusiasms, more given to believing what I want to believe, less inclined to see a clear-cut difference between black and white.

[Pg 5]

It is not strange, therefore, that our opinions often differ, but in this case we were of one mind from the first, the only difficulty that faced us being the question of ways and means, and on this point Marion was, strange to say, more optimistic than I.

"I have a feeling, a presentiment," she said, in a tone of fervent conviction, "that if we make up our minds hard enough it will become possible. We've been talking about this for years, and I never felt until this moment that it was really going to be true."

For a moment her calm certainty influenced my hopes, then I shook my head doubtfully. "You forget," I rejoined, "that there's no other opening in sight, and as long as I'm doing 'Music and Drama' for the Observer I must stay in the city. If I had regular hours, if I were a bank clerk,[Pg 6] for instance, we might live in the suburbs, but——"

[Pg 6]

"We've been over all that hundreds of times," she interrupted, "and you know that if you had been a bank clerk I wouldn't have married you. You're not going to give up journalism, but I'm sure something will happen to let us live where we want to live. And as for the suburbs, it seems to me it would be better to get a real farm in the real country. If we could find a good comfortable farm-house near the railroad with plenty of land around it, I don't believe it would cost us any more than one of those flimsy cottages with a garden plot attached that we looked at last year."

I found, as we talked the matter over, that Marion's imagination had been fired by the idea of some quaint old-fashioned homestead with gabled roof, open fireplaces and latticed windows, surrounded by ancient shade-trees and a straggling apple-orchard. All these accessories I could appreciate, and, in comparison, an ordinary suburban cottage, one of many 

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