way of reward?

When they were alone in the new-old home Steve felt it only decent to
congratulate her. Somehow he had come to feel that keeping up sham
courtesies made everything easier.

"You have worked very hard, haven't you?" he asked. "But you have
wonderful results."

"Do you think so? Everyone hates me now, for there will never be
another royal bedroom set like mine on the market--when you think that
Gay skirmished about and won it for me, it is quite remarkable. And it
shows what Gay can do when he has a little encouragement. Alice Twill
was almost cross-eyed and crying; her husband nipped the chateau idea
in the bud. New York men are coming here to take photographs next
week. I wish the garden were in better shape. They are going to run
feature stories about it.... Oh, Steve, do you think of any new place
to go this summer?"

"I thought we had just moved to Venice," he said, still dazed at the
amount of carved fire screens, tapestries, dim, impractical
candlelights, and soft-eyed Madonnas which smiled at him on all
sides.

"I must have all the office force come and see this--it would be such
a treat. And we can serve tea on the lawn."

"Do. They don't often take time to go to museums."

Steve's bad nature was getting the better of polite resolves. He was
thinking of Mary's clear, witty eyes as she would view the remains of
a plain American house.

The next thing of interest to keep Beatrice at home was the advent of
a real lion cub, following Monster's departure to canine heaven. Being
too impossible of shape and disposition for any one's pride or
comfort, Monster was disposed of and buried in a satin-lined coffin
with a neat white headstone telling salient facts of her short
existence.

While Steve was giving devout thanks for the event Beatrice was
realizing that the gardens needed a dominating note, as Gay said.
During her reading of old fables and romantic legends about superwomen
or extremely wicked matrons she had discovered that they nearly all
possessed a lion or a bear or a brace of elephants to gambol on the
green. Such a pet symbolized its owner's power and fearlessness, and
any young woman who could have the Emperor of China's bedroom suite
brought post haste into Hanover, U. S. A., was surely entitled to
something in the jungle line for her front yard!

For the first time in his daughter's life Mark Constantine made a
faint protest, suggesting that she have a taxidermist mount severa