ss practiced her violin in the
dining-room, and five ubiquitous children sprawled and shouted and blew
trumpets and put tadpoles in the water-jugs, and the mid-day dinner was
two hours late-and proportionately bad--because the Italian cook was
posing for Fulmer.

Lansing's first thought had been that meeting Susy in such circumstances
would be the quickest way to cure them both of their regrets. The case
of the Fulmers was an awful object-lesson in what happened to young
people who lost their heads; poor Nat, whose pictures nobody bought, had
gone to seed so terribly-and Grace, at twenty-nine, would never again be
anything but the woman of whom people say, "I can remember her when she
was lovely."

But the devil of it was that Nat had never been such good company, or
Grace so free from care and so full of music; and that, in spite of
their disorder and dishevelment, and the bad food and general crazy
discomfort, there was more amusement to be got out of their society
than out of the most opulently staged house-party through which Susy and
Lansing had ever yawned their way.

It was almost a relief to tile young man when, on the second afternoon,
Miss Branch drew him into the narrow hall to say: "I really can't
stand the combination of Grace's violin and little Nat's motor-horn any
longer. Do let us slip out till the duet is over."

"How do they stand it, I wonder?" he basely echoed, as he followed her
up the wooded path behind the house.

"It might be worth finding out," she rejoined with a musing smile.

But he remained resolutely skeptical. "Oh, give them a year or two more
and they'll collapse--! His pictures will never sell, you know. He'll
never even get them into a show."

"I suppose not. And she'll never have time to do anything worth while
with her music."

They had reached a piny knoll high above the ledge on which the house
was perched. All about them stretched an empty landscape of endless
featureless wooded hills. "Think of sticking here all the year round!"
Lansing groaned.

"I know. But then think of wandering over the world with some people!"

"Oh, Lord, yes. For instance, my trip to India with the Mortimer
Hickses. But it was my only chance and what the deuce is one to do?"

"I wish I knew!" she sighed, thinking of the Bockheimers; and he turned
and looked at her.

"Knew what?"

"The answer to your question. What is one to do--when one sees both
sides of the problem? Or every possible sid