d. "There, Nathaniel, what did I tell
you?" she triumphed.

"That's one of your mother's latest extravagances," explained Judge
Emery. "There's a crazy fad in Endbury for special handmade furniture.
Maybe it's all right, but I can't see it's so much better than what you
buy in the department stores. Grand Rapids is good enough for me."

"He doesn't like the man who made it," said Mrs. Emery accusingly.

"What's the matter with him?" asked Lydia, rubbing her hand luxuriously
over the satin-smooth, lusterless wood of the sofa's high back.

Judge Emery replied, with his laugh of easy, indifferent tolerance for
everything outside the profession of the law, "Oh, I never said I didn't
like him; I only said he struck me as a crack-brained, self-willed,
conceited--"

Lydia laughed. She thought her father's dry, ironic turns very witty.

"I never saw anything conceited about him," protested Mrs. Emery,
admitting the rest of the indictment.

Judge Emery sat down on the sofa in question and pulled his tie into
shape. "Well, folks are always conceited who find the ordinary ways of
doing things not good enough for them. Lydia, what do you think of this
tie? Nobody pays a proper attention to my ties but you."

"I've brought you some beauties from London," said Lydia. Then reverting
with a momentary curiosity to the subject they had left, "Whatever does
this man do that's so queer?"

"Oh, he's just one of the back-to-all-fours faddists," said her father.

"Back-to-all-fours?" Lydia was dim as to his meaning, but willing to be
amused.

"That's just your father's way," exclaimed Mrs. Emery, who had not her
daughter's fondness for the Judge's tricks of speech.

"He lives as no Dago ditch-digger with a particle of get-up-and-get in
him would be willing to," said Judge Emery finally.

Lydia turned to her mother.

"Why, it's nothing that would interest you in the least, dear," said the
matron, taking in admiringly Lydia's French dress. "Only for a little
while everybody was talking about how strangely he acted. He was an
insurance man, like Marietta's husband, and getting on finely, when all
of a sudden, for no reason on earth, he threw it all up and went to live
in the woods. Do you mean to say you only paid twenty dollars for that
dress?"

"In the woods!" repeated Lydia.

"Yes; the real woods. His father was a farmer, and left him--why you
know, you've been there ever so many times--the Black Rock woods, the
picnic woo