ee, what we travel with and have
about us. These, the smaller pieces, are the things we take out and
arrange as we can, to make the hotels we stay at and the houses we hire
a little less ugly. Of course it's a danger, and we have to keep watch.
But father loves a fine piece, loves, as he says, the good of it, and
it's for the company of some of his things that he's willing to run his
risks. And we've had extraordinary luck"--Maggie had made that point;
"we've never lost anything yet. And the finest objects are often the
smallest. Values, in lots of cases, you must know, have nothing to do
with size. But there's nothing, however tiny," she had wound up, "that
we've missed."

"I like the class," he had laughed for this, "in which you place me! I
shall be one of the little pieces that you unpack at the hotels, or at
the worst in the hired houses, like this wonderful one, and put out with
the family photographs and the new magazines. But it's something not to
be so big that I have to be buried."

"Oh," she had returned, "you shall not be buried, my dear, till you're
dead. Unless indeed you call it burial to go to American City."

"Before I pronounce I should like to see my tomb." So he had had, after
his fashion, the last word in their interchange, save for the result of
an observation that had risen to his lips at the beginning, which he had
then checked, and which now came back to him. "Good, bad or indifferent,
I hope there's one thing you believe about me."

He had sounded solemn, even to himself, but she had taken it gaily. "Ah,
don't fix me down to 'one'! I believe things enough about you, my dear,
to have a few left if most of them, even, go to smash. I've taken care
of THAT. I've divided my faith into water-tight compartments. We must
manage not to sink."

"You do believe I'm not a hypocrite? You recognise that I don't lie or
dissemble or deceive? Is THAT water-tight?"

The question, to which he had given a certain intensity, had made her,
he remembered, stare an instant, her colour rising as if it had sounded
to her still stranger than he had intended. He had perceived on the spot
that any SERIOUS discussion of veracity, of loyalty, or rather of the
want of them, practically took her unprepared, as if it were quite new
to her. He had noticed it before: it was the English, the American sign
that duplicity, like "love," had to be joked about. It couldn't be "gone
into." So the note of his inquiry was--well, to