ty for everything around him, that made her so efficient a
housewife.

If she possessed a manual for young house-hunters it was assuredly not
by the light of this that she had chosen the home they were installed
in. The 'sort of cottage' had been vacant for many years--an unpromising
and ineligible object, a mile away from a village, and three miles away
from a railway station. The main part of it was an actual cottage, of
seventeenth-century workmanship; but a little stuccoed wing had been
added to each side of it, in 1850 or thereabouts, by an eccentric old
gentleman who at that time chose to make it his home. He had added
also the small stable, a dairy, and other appanages. For these, and for
garden, there was plenty of room, as he had purchased and enclosed half
an acre of the surrounding land Those two stuccoed, very Victorian
wings of his, each with a sash-window above and a French window below,
consorted queerly with the old red brick and the latticed panes. And the
long wooden veranda that he had invoked did not unify the trinity. But
one didn't want it to. The wrongness had a character all its own. The
wrongness was right--at any rate after Mary had hit on it for William.
As a spinster, she would, I think, have been happiest in a trim modern
villa. But it was a belief of hers that she had married a man of strange
genius. She had married him for himself, not for his genius; but this
added grace in him was a thing to be reckoned with, ever so much; a
thing she must coddle to the utmost in a proper setting. She was a year
older than he (though, being so small and slight, she looked several
years younger), and in her devotion the maternal instinct played a
great part. William, as I have already conveyed to you, was not
greatly gifted. Mary's instinct, in this one matter, was at fault. But
endearingly, rightly at fault. And, as William was outwardly odd, wasn't
it well that his home should be so, too? On the inside, comfort was what
Mary always aimed at for him, and achieved.

The ground floor had all been made one room, into which you stepped
straight from the open air. Quite a long big room (or so it seemed, from
the lowness of the ceiling), and well-freshened in its antiquity, with
rush-mats here and there on the irregular red tiles, and very white
whitewash on the plaster between the rafters. This was the dining-room,
drawing-room, and general focus throughout the day, and was called
simply the Room. William ha