im would never have occurred to Roger, who,
like most men of his type, expected every one to be as hardy as
himself--how many generations of his ancestors had stoically toasted
their shins while their backs were freezing! It must be, as Margarita
teasingly insists, that my pathetic care for my rheumatic old bones
was at the bottom of it all, and that I was rapidly assimilating one
of the cardinal doctrines of the swollen purse, that no sum could be
ill spent when spent for my comfort.

Well, well, let it go at that--to use the bluff, pertinent phrase of
the present day. Though Barbara Jencks would have died before she had
let it go at anything like that, I assure you, and has spent many an
eager moment of shy, persistent effort to make me comprehend the
inscrutable and sleepless interest of Providence, an interest which
had intended, from the time of the Exodus, if I seize her idea
correctly, that a hot-air plant should complete the summer home of
Roger Bradley--a man who had less interest in Providence than anyone I
know! Poor Barbara! As I hung about the house that mellow autumn, I
fell, more than once, into musing laughter, as here and there some
piece of furniture, some picture or dish or oddment brought back to me
her uncounted, endless assaults on Margarita's simple, healthy and (to
the orthodox English woman) baseless scheme of existence. Not that it
should have been dignified by so philosophical a term as "scheme":
Margarita was given to the practice of life, not its theory. I never
tired of watching the extraordinary effect of her downright mental
processes upon the mass of perfunctory, inherited ideas whose edges,
once sharp-milled and fresh from some startling Mint, we have dulled
and misshapen with generations of unthinking, accustomed barter.

For instance, a treasure of a Spode fruit dish that I had picked up at
a dewy Devonshire farm, all clotted cream and apple-cheeked children,
caught my eye as it lay on the piano, and I found myself chuckling as
I recalled the unfortunate eddy of doctrine into which the innocent
bit of china had whirled us. Margarita had asked what the quaint
Scriptural figures upon it illustrated, and Miss Jencks, every ready,
had explained to her the parable of the labourers in the vineyard and
the marvel of the late comer's good fortune.

"And that is a very beautiful thought, my dear," she concluded, "is it
not?"

Margarita stared at her in frank surprise.

"Beautiful?" she e