in the quaint old blue-painted
bed that had once held the plump little Knapfs.

"You think anyway he had enough supper? mused the anxious-browed Frau
Knapf.

"To school he will have to go, yes?" murmured Frau Nirlanger,
regretfully.

I tucked in the covers at one side of the bed, not that they needed
tucking, but because it was such a comfortable, satisfying thing to do.

"Just at this minute," I said, as I tucked, "I'd rather be a newspaper
reporter than anything else in the world. As a profession 'tis so
broadenin', an' at the same time, so chancey."

CHAPTER XIII. THE TEST

Some day the marriageable age for women will be advanced from twenty to
thirty, and the old maid line will be changed from thirty to forty. When
that time comes there will be surprisingly few divorces. The husband of
whom we dream at twenty is not at all the type of man who attracts us at
thirty. The man I married at twenty was a brilliant, morbid, handsome,
abnormal creature with magnificent eyes and very white teeth and no
particular appetite at mealtime. The man whom I could care for at thirty
would be the normal, safe and substantial sort who would come in at six
o'clock, kiss me once, sniff the air twice and say: "Mm! What's that
smells so good, old girl? I'm as hungry as a bear. Trot it out. Where
are the kids?"

These are dangerous things to think upon. So dangerous and disturbing to
the peace of mind that I have decided not to see Ernst von Gerhard for a
week or two. I find that seeing him is apt to make me forget Peter Orme;
to forget that my duty begins with a capital D; to forget that I am
dangerously near the thirty year old mark; to forget Norah, and Max, and
the Spalpeens, and the world, and everything but the happiness of being
near him, watching his eyes say one thing while his lips say another.

At such times I am apt to work myself up into rather a savage frame of
mind, and to shut myself in my room evenings, paying no heed to Frau
Nirlanger's timid knocking, or Bennie's good-night message. I uncover my
typewriter and set to work at the thing which may or may not be a
book, and am extremely wretched and gloomy and pessimistic, after this
fashion:

"He probably wouldn't care anything about you if you were free. It is
just a case of the fruit that is out of reach being the most desirable.
Men don't marry frumpy, snuffy old things of thirty, or thereabouts. Men
aren't marrying now-a-days, anyway. Certainly not fo