never
will you let me get home before you do. To expect to find you home and
then open the door into empty rooms--oh, I never lived through such a
twenty minutes!" We had a lark's whistle that we had used since before
our engaged days. Carl would whistle it under my window at the Theta
house in college, and I would run down and out the side door, to the
utter disgust of my well-bred "sisters," who arranged to make cutting
remarks at the table about it in the hope that I would reform my
"servant-girl tactics." That whistle was whistled through those early
Seattle days, through Oakland, through Cambridge, Leipzig, Berlin,
Heidelberg, Munich, Swanage, Berkeley, Alamo in the country, Berkeley
again (he would start it way down the hill so I could surely hear),
Castle Crags, and Seattle. Wherever any of us were in the house, it
meant a dash for all to the front door--to welcome the Dad home.

One evening I was scanning some article on marriage by the fire in
Seattle--it was one of those rare times that Carl too was at home and
going over lectures for the next day. It held that, to be successful,
marriage had to be an adjustment--a giving in here by the man, there by
the woman.

I said to Carl: "If that is true, you must have been doing all the
adjusting; I never have had to give up, or fit in, or relinquish one
little thing, so you've been doing it all."

He thought for a moment, then answered: "You know, I've heard that too,
and wondered about it. For I know I've given up nothing, made no
'adjustments.' On the contrary, I seem always to have been getting more
than a human being had any right to count on."

It was that way, even to the merest details, such as both liking
identically the same things to eat, seasoned the identical way. We both
liked to do the identical things, without a single exception. Perhaps
one exception--he had a fondness in his heart for firearms that I could
not share. (The gleam in his eyes when he got out his collection every
so often to clean and oil it!) I liked guns, provided I did not have to
shoot at anything alive with them; but pistols I just plain did not like
at all. We rarely could pass one of these shooting-galleries without
trying our luck at five cents for so many turns--at clay pigeons or
rabbits whirling around on whatnots; but that was as wild as I ever
wanted to get with a gun.

We liked the same friends without exception, the same books, the same
pictures, the same music. He w