, "has
been satisfactorily solved of late in the new invention of co-operative
housing which you may have heard of."

We owned that we had, with the light indifference of one whom matters of
more money or less did not concern, and our friend went on.

"The plan was invented, you know, by a group of artists who imagined
putting up a large composite dwelling in a street where the cost of land
was not absolutely throat-cutting, and finishing it with tasteful
plainness in painted pine and the like, but equipping it with every
modern convenience in the interest of easier housekeeping. The
characteristic and imperative fact of each apartment was a vast and
lofty studio whose height was elsewhere divided into two floors, and so
gave abundant living-rooms in little space. The proprietorial group may
have been ten, say, but the number of apartments was twice as many, and
the basic hope was to let the ten other apartments for rents which would
carry the expense of the whole, and house the owners at little or no
cost. The curious fact is that this apparently too simple-hearted plan
worked. The Philistines, as the outsiders may be called, liked being
near the self-chosen people; they liked the large life-giving studio
which imparted light and air to the two floors of its rearward division,
and they eagerly paid the sustaining rents. The fortunate experience of
one aesthetic group moved others to like enterprises; and now there are
eight or ten of these co-operative studio apartment-houses in different
parts of the town."

"With the same fortunate experience for the owners?" we queried, with
suppressed sarcasm.

"Not exactly," our friend assented to our intention. "The successive
groups have constantly sought more central, more desirable, more
fashionable situations. They have built not better than they knew, for
that could not be, but costlier, and they have finished in hard woods,
with marble halls and marbleized hall-boys, and the first expense has
been much greater; but actual disaster has not yet followed; perhaps it
is too soon; we must not be impatient; but what has already happened is
what happens with other beautiful things that the aesthetic invent. It
has happened notoriously with all the most lovable and livable summer
places which the artists and authors find out and settle themselves
cheaply and tastefully in. The Philistines, a people wholly without
invention, a cuckoo tribe incapable of self-nesting, stumble upon