ons). "You 'ave
_not_. If I take you off a two inch from each leg of that there bedstead,
and a two inch from each of them there postsis, it'll be the same as if
the builder 'e raised you the ceilin' a four inch."

"By Jove," said Jevons. "So it will."

"Ay, and it'll corst you somethin' like four shillin', instead of p'raps
a matter of forty pound. W'en it comes to tamperin' with ceilin's, you
never know where you are."

"I don't know where I am now," said Jevons, "but it might be better to
leave the ceiling alone. They haven't started tampering, have they?"

"No, sir. They have not."

Viola ordered the carpenter to go into the study again and measure for
those bookshelves. He was her slave and he went.

"Jimmy's been going on like that all day," she said. "He's taken up hours
of that man's time. We shall never get him out of the house."

"I don't want to get him out of the house," said Jevons. "I'm awfully
happy with him."

He was happy (like a child) with everything, with his house and his
garden and his furniture, his oak chests and the dresser and the bureau,
above all he was happy with his bed-tester. He said be had never slept
under a bed-tester in his life, and he was dying to know what it would be
like--to lie there with hundreds of dear little, shy little chintz
rosebuds squinting down at you.

"You'll not lay under them rosebuds, not for a twenty-four hour--"

The carpenter had come back to us. He treated Jevons exactly like a
child.

"That tester can't be set up to-night. Not unless, as I say, you squeeges
of it jam tight between the ceilin' and the floor. An' _then_ you'll 'ave
to prise the ceilin' up every time you moves of it, else you'll start
them postsis all a twistin' and a rockin', an' 'ow'll you feel then?"

Jevons said he felt frightened to death as it was, and the carpenter
could have it his own way provided he didn't hurt the little rosebuds or
frighten _them_; and the carpenter sighed and said that the study was ten
by thirteen and would take a hundred and sixteen feet of bookshelves.

"Let's go and look at the study," said Viola. And we went and looked at
it. And the carpenter came up and looked at _us_. And the foreman and the
other men came in with furniture and things out of the garden, and _they_
looked at us. There wasn't one really large and heavy piece of furniture
except the four-post bed and the tester, and they treated the whole thing
as a joke, as a funny game they wer