so still once in a while--"I am merely a philosopher who has
learned to recognize that what must be must be."

My wife was too much absorbed in her own mysterious mental processes to
take note of or analyze this observation. For a few moments she was
lost in a brown study, and gazed about her with a glance that struck me
as somewhat critical.

"You are an angel, Fred," she repeated, ruminantly. "You took me in
splendidly, didn't you? And to think of your doing it all by yourself!"

She wandered back into the dining-room, and thence to the hall, where
she stood peering up the stairway at the skylight. "Yes," she
continued presently, in a judicial, contemplative tone, "I think it
will do very well on the whole. I am not perfectly sure that the
laundress will be satisfied with the arrangement of the laundry, and I
don't see exactly, Fred, what you are to do for a dressing-room, when
we have more than one visitor. I am out of conceit with the tinting of
the drawing-room ceiling, and--and several of the mantelpieces are
hideous. But, on the other hand, the dining-room is perfectly lovely,
there is no end of closet-room, and the kitchen is a gem. Oh, thank
you, Fred, thank you ever so much. I really never expected that we
could afford to leave the dear old house. It will almost break my
heart to leave it, too, although it is so dirty."

Josephine's guns were spiked, as it were. Having declared that the
house was ideal, she was barred from utterly blasting it in the next
breath. To tell the truth, I felt as a consequence decidedly perky and
inclined to perform the double-shuffle or something of the sort quite
out of keeping with the traditional repose of a philosopher. It was so
obvious to me that I had escaped weeks, if not months, of misery by the
ruse which I had adopted that I was fain to dance with joy. Had I
allowed Josephine to pick out a house she would have felt obliged, even
though she was thoroughly satisfied with the first she saw, to inspect
from top to bottom every other in the market, for fear that she might
see something which pleased her better, and I should have been
compelled to accompany her. There are a few advantages after all in
being of a philosophic turn of mind.

And here is another bit of philosophy for you which I am thoroughly
convinced is sound. A woman adroitly handled will permit her husband
to choose a new unfurnished house for her without serious demur. But
let the lord