t have wanted to be
married to a typewriter _now!"_

"I never really thought of marrying one, Ellen. I'm sure everything has
turned out for the best."

"That's what I'm trying to tell you. You see I was determined it should
turn out that way. I said, what was the use of being lame and being a
burden to you unless there was something _meant_ by it. I'd have fretted
dreadfully if I hadn't felt that there was something to come out of it.
And it has come.... Peter, you'd rather I'd saved you for this than
anything that might have happened?"

"Much rather, Ellen."

It had surprised him in the telling, to see how accurately his sister
had gauged the worldly advantage of his marriage. If Eunice Goodward had
been a piece of furniture, Ellen couldn't have appraised her better at
her obvious worth: beauty and character and family and the mysterious
cachet of society. Clarice had been at work there, too, he suspected.
Miss Goodward fitted in Ellen's mind's eye into her brother's life and
fortune as a picture into its frame.

"I'm very glad you feel that way about it, Ellen," he said again; he was
on the point of telling her about the House of Shining Walls. The
material from which he had drawn its earliest furnishings lay all about
them, the receding blue of the summer sky, the aged, arching apple
boughs. The scent of the wilding rose came faintly in from the country
road--suddenly his sister surprised him with a flash of rare insight.

"I guess there can't anything keep us from the best except ourselves,"
she said. "Being willing to put up with the second best gives us more
trouble than the Lord ever meant for us. Think of the way I've always
wanted children--but if they'd been my real own, they'd have been
sickly, likely, or even lame like me, or just ordinary like the only
kind of man who would have married me. As it is, I've had Clarice's and
now----" She broke off with a quick, old-maidish colour.

Ellen had gone so far as to name all of Peter's children in the days
when nothing seemed so unlikely; now in the face of his recent
engagement she would have thought it indelicate.

"_She_ would have liked you marrying so well, Peter," she finished with
a backward motion of her head toward the room where the parlour set,
banished long ago from the town house, symbolized for Ellen the brooding
maternal presence.

"Yes, she would have liked it." There came back to him with deep
satisfaction his mother's appraisement of you