alking."

"A lot I care!"

"Well, I care a lot," she said, blandly belying her words to Abbie.
"I've got to live among them."

It was a miserable ending to an evening of such promise. He felt as
sheepish as a cub turned out of his best girl's house by a sleepy
parent, but he had no choice. He rose drearily, fought his way into
his overcoat, and growled:

"Good night!"

She sighed "Good night!" and wished that she were not so cantankerous.
The closing of the door shook her whole frame, and she made a step
forward to call him back, but sank into a chair instead, worn out with
the general unsatisfactoriness of life, the complicated mathematical
problem that never comes out even. Marriage is a circle that cannot be
quite squared.

She sat droopily in her chair for a long while, pondering mankind and
womankind and their mutual dependence and incompatibility. It would be
nice to be married if one could stay single at the same time. But it
was hopelessly impossible to eat your cake and have it, too.

Abbie, watching from her window and not knowing that Davidge had gone,
imagined all sorts of things and wished that her wild sister would
marry and settle down. And yet she wished that she herself had stayed
single, for the children were a torment, and of her husband she could
only say that she did not know whether he bothered her the more when
he was away or when he was at home.

When Davidge left Mamise he looked back at the lonely cottage she
stubbornly and miserably occupied and longed to hale her from it into
a palace. As he walked home his heart warmed to all the little
cottages, most of them dark and cheerless, and he longed to change all
these to palaces, too. He felt sorry for the poor, tired people that
lived so humbly there and slept now but to rise in the morning to
begin moiling again.

Sometimes from his office window he surveyed the long lines at the
pay-windows and felt proud that he could pour so much treasure into
the hands of the poor. If he had not schemed and borrowed and
organized they would not have had their wages at all.

But now he wished that there might be no poor and no wages, but
everybody palaced and living on money from home. That seemed to be the
idea, too, of his more discontented working-men, but he could not
imagine how everybody could have a palace and everybody live at ease.
Who was to build the palaces? Who was to cut the marble from the
mountains and haul it, and who to dig the