s instructions, white paint and clean open
purples and green predominating, and now we set to work at once upon
the interesting business of arranging and--with our Venetian glass as a
beginning--furnishing it. We had been fairly fortunate with our wedding
presents, and for the most part it was open to us to choose just exactly
what we would have and just precisely where we would put it.

Margaret had a sense of form and colour altogether superior to mine, and
so quite apart from the fact that it was her money equipped us, I stood
aside from all these matters and obeyed her summons to a consultation
only to endorse her judgment very readily. Until everything was settled
I went every day to my old rooms in Vincent Square and worked at a
series of papers that were originally intended for the FORTNIGHTLY
REVIEW, the papers that afterwards became my fourth book, "New Aspects
of Liberalism."

I still remember as delightful most of the circumstances of getting
into 79, Radnor Square. The thin flavour of indecision about Margaret
disappeared altogether in a shop; she had the precisest ideas of what
she wanted, and the devices of the salesman did not sway her. It was
very pleasant to find her taking things out of my hands with a certain
masterfulness, and showing the distinctest determination to make a
house in which I should be able to work in that great project of "doing
something for the world."

"And I do want to make things pretty about us," she said. "You don't
think it wrong to have things pretty?"

"I want them so."

"Altiora has things hard."

"Altiora," I answered, "takes a pride in standing ugly and uncomfortable
things. But I don't see that they help her. Anyhow they won't help me."

So Margaret went to the best shops and got everything very simple and
very good. She bought some pictures very well indeed; there was a little
Sussex landscape, full of wind and sunshine, by Nicholson, for my study,
that hit my taste far better than if I had gone out to get some such
expression for myself.

"We will buy a picture just now and then," she said, "sometimes--when we
see one."

I would come back through the January mire or fog from Vincent Square to
the door of 79, and reach it at last with a quite childish appreciation
of the fact that its solid Georgian proportions and its fine brass
furnishings belonged to MY home; I would use my latchkey and discover
Margaret in the warm-lit, spacious hall with a partially open