ve a sort of Marie-Antoinette reaction towards a somewhat
painfully achieved simplicity. He's not the man to take any sort of
pose. If he were, it would be impossible not to suspect him of
a little pose in his fondness for going back to his farmer
great-grandfather's setting." Guided by this conversation, and by
shrewd observations of her own, Sylvia had insisted, even to the point
of strenuousness, upon wearing to this first housewarming a cloth
skirt and coat, tempering the severity of this costume with a
sufficiently feminine and beruffled blouse of silk. As their car had
swung up before the plain, square, big-chimneyed old house, and Page
had come to meet them, dressed in khaki-colored forester's garb,
with puttees, Aunt Victoria had been generous enough to admit by an
eye-flash to Sylvia that the girl knew her business very well. There
was not, of course, Sylvia reflected, the slightest pretense of
obscurity between them as to what, under the circumstances, her
business was.

All this lay back of the fact that, as Sylvia, her face bright with
spontaneous interest in pine plantations and lumbering operations,
stepped to the side of the man in puttees, her costume exactly suited
his own.

From the midst of a daring and extremely becoming arrangement of black
and white striped chiffon and emerald-green velvet, Molly's beautiful
face smiled on them approvingly. For various reasons, the spectacle
afforded her as much pleasure as it did extreme discomfort to her
grandfather, and with her usual masterful grasp on a situation she
began to arrange matters so that the investigation of pine plantations
and lumber operations should be conducted _en tete-a-tete_. "Mrs.
Marshall-Smith, you're going to stay here, of course, to look at
Austin's lovely view! Think of his having hidden that view away from
us all till now! I want to go through the house later on, and without
Austin, so I can linger and pry if I like! I want to look at every
single thing. It's lovely--the completest Yankee setting! It looks
as though we all ought to have on clean gingham aprons and wear
steel-rimmed spectacles. No, Austin, don't frown! I don't mean that
for a knock. I love it, honestly I do! I always thought I'd like to
wear clean gingham aprons myself. The only things that are out of
keeping are those shelves and shelves and shelves of solemn books with
such terrible titles!"

"That's a fact, Page," said Morrison, laughing. "Molly's hit the
nail