hat first year. Europe, which he had scarcely glimpsed, glittered
and allured. But travel, Eunice let him know, went much better when you
had a place to come back to. He saw at once how right was everything she
did. Well, then, a house on Fillmore Avenue?

"Oh--shall we be so rich as that, Peter?" He divined some embarrassment
in her as to the scale in which they were to live. "We'll want something
in the country, too," she reminded him.

"I've a couple of options at Maplemont----"

"Oh, Maplemont----" She liked that also, he perceived.

"And a place in Florida. Lessing and I bought it the winter the children
had the diphtheria. They've a very pretty bungalow; we could put up
something like it for ourselves--if you wouldn't mind my sister
occasionally. Ellen isn't happy at hotels."

"Mind! with all you're giving me! You won't think it's just the money,
Peter;" she had a very charming hesitancy about it. "It's what money
stands for, beauty, and suitability--and--everything." He was very
tender with her.

"It's not that I have such a pile of it either," he assured her, "though
I turn over a great deal in the course of a year. It's easier making
money than people think."

"Easier for everybody?" There was a certain eagerness in the look and
voice.

"Easier for those who know how. I'm only forty, and I've learned;
there's not much I couldn't get if I set about it. It's a kind of a
gift, perhaps, like painting or music, but there's a great deal to be
learned, too."

"And some haven't the gift to learn, perhaps." For some reason she
sighed.... He was turning all this over in his mind when suddenly Ellen
recalled him.

"Have you told Clarice yet?"

"I mean to, Sunday, if you don't mind my not coming down to you. Miss
Goodward is spending the week end at Maplemont, and by staying at
Julian's----"

"Of _course_." Ellen sympathized. "I shall want to know what Clarice
says." She never did know exactly, for when Clarice gave Peter her
congratulations in the terrace garden after dinner, she missed,
extraordinarily for her, the felicitous note.

"I'm so happy for Eunice, you can't imagine," she insisted. "I've always
said we've none of us known what Eunice can do until she's had her
opportunity. And now with all the background you can give her---- You'll
see!"

He didn't quite know what he was to see except that if Eunice were to be
in the picture it was bound to be satisfying. But Mrs. Lessing was not
done with h