rred. "Besides, my earning year is only nine
months long."

"Then you really do want money?"

"Yes; not much money, but just enough. That is, if there is any such
half-way stopping-point for the avaricious."

"There is," he asserted. "I have found it for myself. I should like to
have money enough to enable me to write a book in the way a book ought
to be written--in perfect leisure and without a single distracting
thought of the royalty check. No man can do his best with one eye fixed
firmly upon the treasurer's office."

"I had never thought of that," she mused. "I always supposed a writer
worked under inspiration."

"So he does, the inspiration of the butcher and the baker and the
anxious landlord. I can earn a living; I have done it for a number of
years; but it is only a living for one, and there isn't anything to put
aside against the writing of the leisurely book--or other things."

"Oh! then you have other ambitions, too."

"The one ambition that every normal-minded man ought to have: I want a
wife and babies and a home."

"Then you certainly need money," she laughed.

"Sure I do; but not too much--always remember that--not too much."

"What would you call 'too much'?"

"Enough to spoil the children and to make it unnecessary for me ever to
write another line."

This time her laugh was mocking. "Just now you said you wanted enough so
that you could write without thinking of money," she reminded him.

"Oh, there is a golden mean; it doesn't have to be all honey or all
vinegar. A nice tidy little income that would provide at a pinch for
the butcher and the baker and the other people. You know what I mean."

"Yes, I think I do; and my ambition is hardly more soaring than yours.
As you remarked, it doesn't cost so frightfully much to travel and live
abroad."

He looked at her dubiously. "You don't mean that you'd wish to travel
all the time, do you?"

"Why not?"

"Why--er--I don't know precisely. But you'd want to settle down and have
a home some time, wouldn't you?"

"And cook for a man?" she put in. "Perhaps I haven't found the man."

Prime's laugh was boyishly blatant.

"I notice you are cooking pretty assiduously for a man these days. But
perhaps that is only in self-defense. If the man cooked for you you
wouldn't live very long."

"I am merely doing my bit, as the English say," was the cool retort. "I
haven't said that I like to do it."

"But you do like to do it," he insisted. "If y