tiful" room. To my joy I found it high-ceilinged, airy,
and huge, with a great vault of a clothes closet bristling with hooks,
and boasting an unbelievable number of shelves. My trunk was swallowed
up in it. Never in all my boarding-house experience have I seen such a
room, or such a closet. The closet must have been built for a bride's
trousseau in the days of hoop-skirts and scuttle bonnets. There was a
separate and distinct hook for each and every one of my most obscure
garments. I tried to spread them out. I used two hooks to every
petticoat, and three for my kimono, and when I had finished there were
rows of hooks to spare. Tiers of shelves yawned for hat-boxes which I
possessed not. Bluebeard's wives could have held a family reunion
in that closet and invited all of Solomon's spouses. Finally, in
desperation, I gathered all my poor garments together and hung them in a
sociable bunch on the hooks nearest the door. How I should have loved
to have shown that closet to a select circle of New York boarding-house
landladies!

After wrestling in vain with the forest of hooks, I turned my attention
to my room. I yanked a towel thing off the center table and replaced
it with a scarf that Peter had picked up in the Orient. I set up my
typewriter in a corner near a window and dug a gay cushion or two and a
chafing-dish out of my trunk. I distributed photographs of Norah and Max
and the Spalpeens separately, in couples, and in groups. Then I bounced
up and down in a huge yellow brocade chair and found it unbelievably
soft and comfortable. Of course, I reflected, after the big veranda,
and the apple tree at Norah's, and the leather-cushioned comfort of her
library, and the charming tones of her Oriental rugs and hangings--

"Oh, stop your carping, Dawn!" I told myself. "You can't expect charming
tones, and Oriental do-dads and apple trees in a German boarding-house.
Anyhow there's running water in the room. For general utility purposes
that's better than a pink prayer rug."

There was a time when I thought that it was the luxuries that made life
worth living. That was in the old Bohemian days.

"Necessities!" I used to laugh, "Pooh! Who cares about the necessities!
What if the dishpan does leak? It is the luxuries that count."

Bohemia and luxuries! Half a dozen lean boarding-house years have
steered me safely past that. After such a course in common sense you
don't stand back and examine the pictures of a pink Moses in a