rmous kiss of a giantess suddenly rendered
passionate by a vast uprush of elemental feeling. And they ran off,
smiling confidently at their father, giggling, chattering about
important affairs in their intolerable, shrieking voices. George could
never understand why Lois should attempt, as she constantly did, to
instil into them awe of their father; his attitude to the children made
it impossible that she should succeed. But she kept on trying. The
cave-woman again! George would say to himself: "All women are
cave-women."

"Have you come to pack?" she asked, with fatigued fretfulness, showing
no sign of surprise at his arrival.

"Oh no!" he answered, and implied that in his over-charged existence
packing would have to be done when it could, if at all. "I only came in
for one second to see if I could root out that straw hat I wore last
year."

"Do open the window," she implored grievously.

"It is open."

"Both sides?"

"Yes."

"Well, open it more."

"It's wide open."

"Both sides?"

"Yes."

"It's so stuffy in this room," she complained, expelling much breath.

It was stuffy in the room. The room was too full of the multitudinous
belongings and furniture of wife and husband. It was too small for its
uses. The pair, unduly thrown together, needed two rooms. But the house
could not yield them two rooms, though from the outside it had an air of
spaciousness. The space was employed in complying with custom, in
imitating the disposition of larger houses, and in persuading the tenant
that he was as good as his betters. There was a basement, because the
house belonged to the basement era, and because it is simpler to burrow
than to erect. On the ground floor were the hall--narrow, and the
dining-room--narrow. To have placed the dining-room elsewhere would have
been to double the number of stairs between it and the kitchen;
moreover, the situation of the dining-room in all such correct houses is
immutably fixed by the code Thus the handiest room in the house was
occupied during four hours of the twenty-four, and wasted during the
remaining twenty. Behind the dining-room was a very small room
appointed by the code to be George's 'den.' It would never have been
used at all had not George considered it his duty to use it
occasionally, and had not Lois at intervals taken a fancy to it because
it was not hers.

The whole of the first floor was occupied by the landing, the well of
the staircase, and the drawing-roo