ably mouldy.
The bath-room, despite its delightful size, and the ivy that rapped
outside its window, was not a modern bath-room. The backyard, once
sacred to geraniums and grass, and odd pots of shrubs, was sunny for
the children's playing, to be sure, but no longer picturesque after
their sturdy little boots had trampled it down, and with lines of their
little clothes intersecting it. Anne began to think seriously of the
big apartments all about, hitherto regarded as enemies, but perhaps the
solution, after all. The modern flats were delightfully airy, high up
in the sun, their floors were hard-wood, their bath-rooms tiled, their
kitchens all tempting enamel, and nickel plate, and shining new wood.
One had gas to cook with, furnace heat, hall service, and the joy of
the lift.

"What if we do have to endure a dining-room with red paper and black
woodwork, Jim," she would say, "and have near-Tiffany shades and a hall
two feet square? It would be so COMFORTABLE!"

But if Jim agreed,--"we'll have a look at some of them on Sunday," Anne
would hesitate.

"They're so horribly commonplace; they're just what every one else
has!" she would mourn.

Commonplace,--Anne said the word over to herself sometimes, in the long
hours that she spent alone with the children. That was what her life
had become. The inescapable daily routine left her no time for
unnecessary prettiness. She met each day bravely, only to find herself
beaten and exhausted every night. It was puzzling, it was sometimes a
little depressing. Anne reflected that she had always been busy, she
was indeed a little dynamo of energy, her college years and the years
of travel had been crowded with interests and enterprises. But she had
never been tired before; she had never felt, as she felt now, that she
could fall asleep at the dinner table for sheer weariness, and that no
trial was more difficult to bear than Jim's cheerful announcement that
the Deanes might be in later for a call, or the Weavers wanted them to
come over for a game of bridge.

And what did she accomplish, after all? she thought sometimes. What
mark did her busy days leave upon her life? She dressed and undressed
the children, she bathed, rocked, amused them; indeed, she was so
adoring a mother that sometimes whole precious fractions of hours
slipped by while she was watching them, laughing at them, catching the
little unresponsive soft cheeks to hers for the kisses that interfered
so seriously wi