er shrinking
husband's hook? Not only that, but who banters the worms, telling them
it's all for their own good?"

The mistress of Heartholm, looking over at the two, shook a deprecating
head. But Strang seemed to derive amusement from the guest's
disapproval.

Mockwood, where the Strangs lived, had its impressiveness partly
accounted for by the practical American name of "residential park."
This habitat, covering many thousands of acres, gave evidence of the
usual New World compromise between fantastic wealth and over-reached
restraint. Polished automobiles gliding noiselessly through massed
purple and silver shrubberies, receded into bland glooms of
well-thought-out boscage. The architecture, a judicious mixture of
haughty roofs and opulent chimneys, preened itself behind exclusive
screens of wall and vine, and the entire frontage of Mockwood presented
a polished elegance which did not entirely conceal a silent plausibility
of expense.

At Heartholm, the Strangs' place, alone, had the purely conventional
been smitten in its smooth face. The banker's country home was built on
the lines of his own physical height and mental breadth. Strang had
flung open his living-rooms to vistas of tree branches splashing against
the morning blue. His back stairs were as aspiring as the Apostles'
Creed, and his front stairs as soaring as the Canticle to the Sun. As he
had laid out his seven-mile drive on a deer track leading to a forest
spring, so had he spoken for his flowers the word, which, though it
freed them from the prunes and prisms of a landscape gardener, held
them, glorified vassals, to their original masters, sun and rain.

Strang and his love for untrammeled nature were hard pills for
Mockwooders to swallow. Here was a man who, while he kept one on the
alert, was to be deplored; who homesteaded squirrels, gave rabbits their
own licentious ways, was whimsically tolerant of lichens, mushrooms, and
vagabond vines. This was also the man who, when his gardener's wife gave
birth to a deaf and dumb baby, encouraged his own wife to make a pet of
the unfortunate youngster, and when he could walk gave him his freedom
of the Heartholm acres.

It was this sort of thing, Mockwooders agreed, that "explained" the
Strangs. It was the desultory gossip of fashionable breakfast tables how
Evelyn Strang was frequently seen at the gardener's cottage, talking to
the poor mother about her youngest. The gardener's wife had other
children,