hing of it, he owed it to the
practical sympathy of his client.

"Practical sympathy is good," said Bromfield Corey; and, slanting his
head confidentially to Mrs. Lapham, he added, "Does he bleed your
husband, Mrs. Lapham? He's a terrible fellow for appropriations!"

Mrs. Lapham laughed, reddening consciously, and said she guessed the
Colonel knew how to take care of himself. This struck Lapham, then
draining his glass of sauterne, as wonderfully discreet in his wife.
Bromfield Corey leaned back in his chair a moment. "Well, after all,
you can't say, with all your modern fuss about it, that you do much
better now than the old fellows who built such houses as this."

"Ah," said the architect, "nobody can do better than well. Your house
is in perfect taste; you know I've always admired it; and I don't think
it's at all the worse for being old-fashioned. What we've done is
largely to go back of the hideous style that raged after they forgot
how to make this sort of house. But I think we may claim a better
feeling for structure. We use better material, and more wisely; and by
and by we shall work out something more characteristic and original."

"With your chocolates and olives, and your clutter of bric-a-brac?"

"All that's bad, of course, but I don't mean that. I don't wish to
make you envious of Colonel Lapham, and modesty prevents my saying,
that his house is prettier,--though I may have my convictions,--but
it's better built. All the new houses are better built. Now, your
house----"

"Mrs. Corey's house," interrupted the host, with a burlesque haste in
disclaiming responsibility for it that made them all laugh. "My
ancestral halls are in Salem, and I'm told you couldn't drive a nail
into their timbers; in fact, I don't know that you would want to do it."

"I should consider it a species of sacrilege," answered Seymour, "and I
shall be far from pressing the point I was going to make against a
house of Mrs. Corey's."

This won Seymour the easy laugh, and Lapham silently wondered that the
fellow never got off any of those things to him.

"Well," said Corey, "you architects and the musicians are the true and
only artistic creators. All the rest of us, sculptors, painters,
novelists, and tailors, deal with forms that we have before us; we try
to imitate, we try to represent. But you two sorts of artists create
form. If you represent, you fail. Somehow or other you do evolve the
camel out of your inner