nto possession on the following
day, and Mrs. Cafferty said he was a very nice young man indeed and
did not drink.

XXVI

Mrs. Cafferty's lodger duly arrived. He was young and as thin as a
lath, and he moved with fury. He was seldom in the place at all: he
fled into the house for his food, and, having eaten it, he fled away
from the house again, and did not reappear until it was time to go to
bed. What he did with himself in the interval Mrs. Cafferty did not
know, but she was prepared to wager her soul, the value of which she
believed was high, on the fact that he was a good young man who never
gave the slightest trouble, saving that his bedclothes were always
lying on the floor in the morning, that there was candle grease on one
corner of his pillow, and that he cleaned his boots on a chair. But
these were things which one expected a young man to do, and the
omission of them might have caused one to look curiously at the
creature and to doubt his masculinity.

Mrs. Makebelieve replied that habits of order and neatness were rarely
to be found in young people of either sex; more especially were these
absent in boys who are released in early youth by their mothers from
all purely domestic employments. A great many people believed, and she
believed herself, that it was not desirable a man or boy should
conform too rigidly to household rules. She had observed that the
comfort of a home was lost to many men if they were expected to take
their boots off when they came into the house or to hang their hats up
in a special place. The women of a household, being so constantly
indoors, find it easy and businesslike to obey the small rules which
comprise household legislation, but as the entire policy of a house
was to make it habitable and comfortable for its men folk all domestic
ordinances might be strained to the uttermost until the compromise
was found to mollify even exceptional idiosyncrasies. A man, she held,
bowed to quite sufficient discipline during his working hours, and his
home should be a place free from every vexatious restraint and wherein
he might enjoy as wide a liberty as was good for him.

These ideas were applauded by Mrs. Cafferty, and she supplemented them
by a recital of how she managed her own husband, and of the ridiculous
ease whereby any man may be governed; for she had observed that men
were very susceptible to control if only the control was not too
apparent. If a man did a thing twice t