red brick with marble trimmings and
marble wedges over the ample windows, some years later I saw the house
by Ferguson, of New York, from which Archie had cribbed it. At one end,
off the dining-room, was a semicircular conservatory. There was a small
portico, with marble pillars, and in the ample, swift sloping roof
many dormers; servants' rooms, Archie explained. The look of anxiety
on Maude's face deepened as he went over the floor plans, the
reception-room; dining room to seat thirty, the servants' hall;
and upstairs Maude's room, boudoir and bath and dress closet, my
"apartments" adjoining on one side and the children's on the other, and
the guest-rooms with baths....

Maude surrendered, as one who gives way to the inevitable. When the
actual building began we both of us experienced, I think; a certain mild
excitement; and walked out there, sometimes with the children, in the
spring evenings, and on Sunday afternoons. "Excitement" is, perhaps, too
strong a word for my feelings: there was a pleasurable anticipation
on my part, a looking forward to a more decorous, a more luxurious
existence; a certain impatience at the delays inevitable in building.
But a new legal commercial enterprise of magnitude began to absorb me
at his time, and somehow the building of this home--the first that we
possessed was not the event it should have been; there were moments when
I felt cheated, when I wondered what had become of that capacity for
enjoyment which in my youth had been so keen. I remember indeed, one
grey evening when I went there alone, after the workmen had departed,
and stood in the litter of mortar and bricks and boards gazing at the
completed front of the house. It was even larger than I had imagined it
from the plans; in the Summer twilight there was an air about it,--if
not precisely menacing, at least portentous, with its gaping windows
and towering roof. I was a little tired from a hard day; I had the
odd feeding of having raised up something with which--momentarily
at least--I doubted my ability to cope: something huge, impersonal;
something that ought to have represented a fireside, a sanctuary, and
yet was the embodiment of an element quite alien to the home; a restless
element with which our American atmosphere had, by invisible degrees,
become charged. As I stared at it, the odd fancy seized me that the
building somehow typified my own career.... I had gained something, in
truth, but had I not also missed some