of the highly polished bureau in her room. A line in Susan's letter
occurred to her: "Mother hopes to see you soon. She asked me to tell you
to buy good things which will last you all your life, and says that it
pays."

The tea-table was steaming in the parlour in front of the wood fire in
the blue tiled fireplace. The oak floor reflected its gleam, and that of
the electric lights; the shades were drawn; a slight odour of steam heat
pervaded the place. Howard, smoking a cigarette, was reclining on a
sofa that evidently was not made for such a purpose, reading the evening
newspapers.

"Well, Honora," he said, as she took her seat behind the tea-table, "you
haven't told me how you like it. Pretty cosey, eh? And enough spare room
to have people out over Sundays."

"Oh, Howard, I do like it," she cried, in a desperate attempt--which
momentarily came near succeeding to convince herself that she could
have desired nothing more. "It's so sweet and clean and new--and all our
own."

She succeeded, at any rate, in convincing Howard. In certain matters, he
was easily convinced.

"I thought you'd be pleased when you saw it, my dear," he said.

CHAPTER III. THE GREAT UNATTACHED

It was the poet Cowper who sang of domestic happiness as the only bliss
that has survived the Fall. One of the burning and unsolved questions of
to-day is,--will it survive the twentieth century? Will it survive
rapid transit and bridge and Woman's Rights, the modern novel and modern
drama, automobiles, flying machines, and intelligence offices; hotel,
apartment, and suburban life, or four homes, or none at all? Is it a
weed that will grow anywhere, in a crevice between two stones in the
city? Or is it a plant that requires tender care and the water of
self-sacrifice? Above all, is it desirable?

Our heroine, as may have been suspected, has an adaptable temperament.
Her natural position is upright, but like the reed, she can bend
gracefully, and yields only to spring back again blithely. Since this
chronicle regards her, we must try to look at existence through her
eyes, and those of some of her generation and her sex: we must give
the four years of her life in Rivington the approximate value which
she herself would have put upon it--which is a chapter. We must regard
Rivington as a kind of purgatory, not solely a place of departed
spirits, but of those which have not yet arrived; as one of the many
temporary abodes of the Great Unattached.