trimmings and marble
wedges over the ample windows, some years later I saw the house by
Ferguson, of New York, from which Archie had cribbed it. At one end, off
the dining-room, was a semicircular conservatory. There was a small
portico, with marble pillars, and in the ample, swift sloping roof many
dormers; servants' rooms, Archie explained. The look of anxiety on
Maude's face deepened as he went over the floor plans, the
reception-room; dining room to seat thirty, the servants' hall; and
upstairs Maude's room, boudoir and bath and dress closet, my "apartments"
adjoining on one side and the children's on the other, and the
guest-rooms with baths....

Maude surrendered, as one who gives way to the inevitable. When the
actual building began we both of us experienced, I think; a certain mild
excitement; and walked out there, sometimes with the children, in the
spring evenings, and on Sunday afternoons. "Excitement" is, perhaps, too
strong a word for my feelings: there was a pleasurable anticipation on my
part, a looking forward to a more decorous, a more luxurious existence; a
certain impatience at the delays inevitable in building. But a new legal
commercial enterprise of magnitude began to absorb me at his time, and
somehow the building of this home--the first that we possessed was not
the event it should have been; there were moments when I felt cheated,
when I wondered what had become of that capacity for enjoyment which in
my youth had been so keen. I remember indeed, one grey evening when I
went there alone, after the workmen had departed, and stood in the litter
of mortar and bricks and boards gazing at the completed front of the
house. It was even larger than I had imagined it from the plans; in the
Summer twilight there was an air about it,--if not precisely menacing, at
least portentous, with its gaping windows and towering roof. I was a
little tired from a hard day; I had the odd feeding of having raised up
something with which--momentarily at least--I doubted my ability to cope:
something huge, impersonal; something that ought to have represented a
fireside, a sanctuary, and yet was the embodiment of an element quite
alien to the home; a restless element with which our American atmosphere
had, by invisible degrees, become charged. As I stared at it, the odd
fancy seized me that the building somehow typified my own career.... I
had gained something, in truth, but had I not also missed something?
something a di