, make yourself think with
my viewpoint as a starting place. Suppose you had been a dreamer of a
boy with a pirate's daring and a poet's unreal delusions, and you
combined the two to produce a fortune, a fortune everyone marvelled
at, the lucky turn of the wheel. Suppose you used that fortune with
the same daring and fancy, loving someone with all your heart, to make
money in a regular business and under the guidance of a well-trained
merchant like your father--and then you married the person you loved
and saw her deliberately belittle your manhood by going to her
father's house to live, spending her father's money, and leaving you
quite alone and without the joyous and needed responsibility of
supporting your wife. Now what would you do?"

"I'd start right in spending my own money for things I wanted," she
decided, glibly.

"But suppose you did not want things--cluttery, everlasting
things, glaring, upholstered, painted, carved, what not--lugged
from the four corners of the earth, not harmonizing with your own
aims or interests? Suppose you wanted to create an individual and
representative home and take care of it and the guardian angel who
presided therein--then what would you do?"

"Oh--you mean you want another style of house? Then let's buy a
country tract--and I promise to let you build and furnish just as you
wish. That's a bully idea, dear, to have an abrupt contrast to this
house--old-English manor type would be wonderful!"

The dinner gong brought a merciful release. Beatrice danced through
the archway throwing him a kiss as the rest of her decision.

It was at this identical moment that Steve concluded it was too late
for his wife ever to develop anything more than a double chin or so.

CHAPTER XVI

During Beatrice's house party, at which twenty or so equally Gorgeous
Girls and their husbands were quartered in the Villa Rosa, while a
string orchestra danced them further along the road toward nervous
prostration each night, a fire ignited in the offices of the O'Valley
Leather Company.

Steve's office and Mary's adjoining room were damaged by water rather
than by the slight blaze itself and during an enforced recess from
work both Mary and Steve found that a fire in an office building may
cause a loss of time from routine yet be a great personal boon.

The day following the accident, Steve having been summoned at midnight
to view the flames, Mary came to the office to try to rescue the files