oy,
you'll lose him. I remember puffectly well hearin' my dear father say,
'If you want to catch a man's heart, set a trap in his stomach.' Bingo!
Bingo!" (The little dog, standing on his hind legs, superciliously
accepted a chocolate drop--then ran back to Eleanor.) "Maurice will be a
man one of these days, and a man can't live on love; he wants 'wittles
and drink.' When I married your uncle Thomas, my dear father said, 'Feed
him--and amuse him.' So I made up my mind on my weddin' day to have good
food and be entertainin'. And I must say I did it! I fed your dear
uncle, and I talked to him, until he died." She paused, and looked at
the paper on the wall. "I _hope_ the Lord will send you children; it
will help you hold the boy--and perhaps you'll be more efficient! You'll
have to be, or they'll die. Get a cook." Then, talking all the way
downstairs, she trundled off, in angry, honest, forgiving anxiety for
her niece's welfare.

Eleanor, planning for the little sunny room, felt bruised by that
bludgeon word--which, as it happened, was not accurate, for Maurice, by
this time, had gained a maturity of thought and patience that put him
practically out of boyhood. When Eleanor repeated her caller's remarks
to him, she left that one word out; "Auntie implied," she said, "that
you wouldn't love me, if you didn't have fancy cooking."

"She's a peach on cooking herself," declared Maurice; "but, as far as my
taste goes, I don't give a hoot for nightingales' tongues on toast."

So, as fancy cooking was not a necessity to Maurice, and as he had
resigned himself to an absence of any social life, and didn't really
mind smoking in a room with a silly paper on the walls (he had been very
much touched when Eleanor told him what the paper meant to her in hope,
and unsatisfied longing), he was perfectly contented in the ugly little
house in the raw, new street. In point of fact, music and books provided
the Bread of Life to Maurice--with solitaire thrown in as a pleasant
extra!--so "wittles and drink" did not begin to be a consideration until
the first year of married life had passed. Eleanor remembered the date
when--because of something Maurice said--she began to realize that they
must be considered. It was on the anniversary of their wedding--a
cloudy, cold day; but all the same, with valiant sentimentality, they
went--Bingo at their heels--to celebrate, in the meadow of those
fifty-four minutes of married life. As they crossed the f