."

"Well, here's one for four thousand pounds. That's not so bad. I mean as
a price, not as a house."

"Have you got four thousand pounds?"

"No; I was hoping _you_ had."

"Couldn't you mortgage something--up to the hilt?"

"We'll have a look," I said.

We spent the rest of that day looking for something to mortgage, but
found nothing with a hilt at all high up.

"Anyhow," I said, "it was a rotten house."

"Wouldn't it be simpler," said Celia, "to put in an advertisement
ourselves, describing exactly the sort of house we want? That's the way
I always get servants."

"A house is so much more difficult to describe than a cook."

"Oh, but I'm sure _you_ could do it. You describe things so well."

Feeling highly flattered, I retired to the library and composed.

For the first hour or so I tried to do it in the _staccato_ language of
house-agents. They say all they want to say in five lines; I tried to
say all we wanted to say in ten. The result was hopeless. We both agreed
that we should hate to live in that sort of house. Celia indeed seemed
to feel that if I couldn't write better than that we couldn't afford to
live in a house at all.

"You don't seem to realise," I said, "that in the ordinary way people
pay _me_ for writing. This time, so far from receiving any money, I have
actually got to hand it out in order to get into print at all. You can
hardly expect me to give my best to an editor of that kind."

"I thought that the artist in you would insist on putting your best into
_everything_ that you wrote, quite apart from the money."

Of course after that the artist in me had to pull himself together. An
hour later it had delivered itself as follows:--

"WANTED, an unusual house. When I say unusual I mean that it mustn't
look like anybody's old house. Actually it should contain three
living-rooms and five bedrooms. One of the bedrooms may be a
dressing-room, if it is quite understood that a dressing-room does not
mean a cupboard in which the last tenant's housemaid kept her brushes.
The other four bedrooms must be a decent size and should get plenty of
sun. The exigencies of the solar system may make it impossible for the
sun to be always there, but it should be around when wanted. With regard
to the living-rooms, it is essential that they should not be square
but squiggly. The drawing-room should be particularly squiggly; the
dining-room should have at least an air of squiggliness; and the third
roo