needle quivered like a leaf in the wind; she could not pass it
between the thread and her white forefinger. He hesitated a moment,
glanced at her face, smiled inscrutably, and deliberately reseated
himself.

"What in the world could I do, you see?" he inquired meditatively, as if
that had been the subject under discussion for some time. "I can't
make cardboard boxes, you know. It's perfectly useless, my going into a
factory. Wheels and belts and things always give me the maddest
longing to jump into them--I couldn't resist it! And that would be so
unpleasant--"

She dropped her wool and clasped her hands under it.

"Oh, Mr. Welles," she cried eagerly, "how absurd! As if I meant that! As
if I meant anything like it!"

"Had you thought of anything, then?" he asked interestedly.

She nodded gravely. "Why, yes," she said. "It wouldn't be right for me
to say you must do something, and then offer no suggestions whatever,
knowing as I do how you feel about it. I thought of such a good plan,
and one that would be the best possible answer to Tom--"

"Oh, good heavens!" murmured her lodger, but she went on quickly: "You
know I was going to open the soup-kitchen in October. Well, I've just
thought, Why not get the Rooms all ready, and the reading-room moved
over there, and have lemonade and sandwiches and sarsaparilla, and
Kitty Waters to begin to serve right away, as she's beginning to run the
streets again, and Annabel Riley with her? Then the Civic Club can have
its headquarters there, and people will begin to be used to it before
cold weather."

"And I am to serve sarsaparilla and sandwiches with Kitty and Annabel?
Really, dear Miss Gould, if you knew how horribly ill sarsaparilla is
certain to make me--I have loathed it from childhood--"

"Oh, no, no, no!" she interrupted, with her sweet, tolerant smile. She
smiled at him as if he had been a child.

"You know I never meant that you should work all day, Mr. Welles. It
isn't at all necessary. I have always felt that an hour or two a day of
intelligent, cultivated work was fully equal to a much longer space of
manual labor that is more mechanical, more tiresome."

"Better fifty years of poker than a cycle of croquet!" her lodger
murmured. "Yes, I have always felt that myself."

"And somebody must be there from ten to twelve, say, in the mornings,
in what we call the office; just to keep an eye on things, and answer
questions about the kitchen, and watch the reading