known what sort of things were acceptable to the out-of-town
trade. He had selected this one distinctly with an eye to the pleasure
his mother and Ellen would get out of what Bloombury would think of it.
He hadn't expected it would turn and rend him. That it was distinctly
better than anything he had had at Blodgett's was inconsiderable beside
the fact that Blodgett's hadn't owned him. That he was owned now by his
sister and the furniture, was plain to him the first time he sat down to
figure out the difference between his salary and what it would cost him
to let Ellen be a burden to him in the way that made her happiest. Not
that he thought of Ellen in that way; he was glad when he thought of it
at all articulately, to be able to make life so little of a burden to
her. But though he saw quite clearly how, without some fortunate
accident, the rest of his life would be taken up with making a home for
Ellen and making it secure for her in case anything happened to him, he
saw too, that there was no room in it for the Lovely Lady. The worst of
all this was that he did not see how he was to go on without her.

He had fled to her from the inadequacy of all substitutes for her that
his life afforded, and she had ended by making him over into the sort of
man who could never be satisfied with anything less. Something he owed,
no doubt, to that trait of his father's which made his memories of Italy
more to him than his inheritance, but there it was, a world Peter had
built up out of books and pictures and music, more real and habitable
than that in which he went about in a gray business suit and a pleasant
ready manner; a world from which, every time he fitted his key in the
latch of the little flat in Pleasanton, he felt himself suddenly
dispossessed.

It was not that he failed to get a proper pleasure out of being a
householder, in being able to take a certain tone with the butcher and
discuss water rates and rents with other householders going to and fro
on his train. Ellen's cooking tasted good to him and it was very
pleasant to see the pleasure it gave her to have Burnell of the
hardware, out to supper occasionally. He made friends with Lessing,
whose natty and determinedly architectural office with its air of being
somehow akin to Wally Whitaker, occupied the corner where Peter waited
every morning for his car. Lessing began it by coming out on the very
first occasion to ask him how his sister did, in an effort to correct