pace and leisure to live in, is a thing I can't
figure out on any basis except of defective intelligence. I suppose
they're equally puzzled about me when I refuse a profitable piece of law
work they've offered me, because I don't consider it interesting. All
the same, I get what I want, and I'm pretty dubious sometimes whether
they do. I want space--comfortable elbow room, so that if I happen to
get an idea by the tail, I can swing it around my head without knocking
over the lamp."

"It's a luxury though, Rod, that kind of spaciousness, and you aren't
very rich. If you married a girl without anything ..."

He broke in on her with that big laugh of his. "You've kept your sense
of humor pretty well, sis, considering you've been married all these
years to a man as rich as Martin, but don't spring remarks like that, or
I'll think you've lost it. If a man can't keep an open space around him,
even after he's married, on an income, outside of what he can earn, of
ten or twelve thousand dollars a year, the trouble isn't with his
income. It's with the content of his own skull."

She gave a little shiver and snuggled closer into a big down pillow.

"You will marry somebody, though, won't you, Roddy? I'll try not to nag
at you and I won't make any more silly plans, but I can't help worrying
about you, living alone in that awful big old house. Anybody but you
would die of despondency."

"Oh," he said, "that's what I meant to talk to you about! I sold it
to-day--fifty thousand dollars--immediate possession. Man wants to build
a printing establishment there. You come down sometime next week and
pick out all the things you think you and Harriet would like to keep,
and I'll auction off the rest."

She shivered again and, to her disgust, found that her eyes were
blurring up with tears. She was a little bit slack and edgy to-day,
anyhow.

But really there was something rather remorseless about Rodney. It
occurred to her that the woman he finally did marry would need to be
strong and courageous and rather insensitive to sentimental fancies, to
avoid a certain amount of unhappiness.

What he had just referred to in a dozen brisk words, was the final
disappearance of the home they had all grown up in. Their father, one of
Chicago's great men during the twenty great years between the Fire and
the Fair, had built it when the neighborhood included nearly all the
other big men of that robust period, and had always been proud of it.
Th