get it up and into the apartment after
the Little Woman had gone to bed. I could spread it down at my leisure
and decorate the walls with some of those now on the floor. When on the
glad Christmas morning this would burst upon the Little Woman in sudden
splendor, I felt that she would not be too severe in her judgment.

It was a good plan, and it worked as well as most plans do. There were
some hitches, of course. The Little Woman, for instance, was not yet in
bed when the janitor was ready to help me, and I was in mortal terror
lest she should hear us getting the big roll into the hallway, or coming
out later should stumble over it in the dark. But she did not seem to
hear, and she did not venture out into the hall. Neither did she seem
to notice anything unusual when by and by I stumbled over it myself and
plunged through a large pasteboard box in which there was something else
for the Little Woman--something likely to make her still more lenient in
the matter of the rug. I made enough noise to arouse the people in the
next flat, but the Little Woman can be very discreet on Christmas eve.

She slept well the next morning, too,--a morning I shall long remember.
If you have never attempted to lay a ten-by-twelve Khiva rug in a small
flat-parlor, under couches and tables and things, and with an extra
supply of steam going, you do not understand what one can undergo for
the sake of art. It's a fairly interesting job for three people--two to
lift the furniture and one to spread the rug, and even then it isn't
easy to find a place to stand on. It was about four o clock I think when
I began, and the memory of the next three hours is weird, and lacking in
Christmas spirit. I know now just how every piece of furniture we
possess looks from the under side. I suppose this isn't a bad sort of
knowledge to have, but I would rather not acquire it while I am pulling
the wrinkles out of a two-hundred-pound rug. But when the Little Woman
looked at the result and at me she was even more kind than I had
expected. She did not denounce me. She couldn't. Looking me over
carefully she realized dimly what the effort had cost, and pitied me. It
was a happy Christmas, altogether, and in the afternoon, looking at our
possessions, the Little Woman remarked that we needed a house now to
display them properly. It was a chance remark but it bore fruit.

XII.

_Gilded Affluence._

Yet not immediately. We had still to make the final step