shows. She
was a Van Der Pool. Fountains were made to play for her; monkeys were
made for other people's ancestors; dogs, she understood, were created
to be companions of blind persons and objectionable characters who
smoked pipes.

This was the Matterhorn that Robert Walmsley accomplished. If he
found, with the good poet with the game foot and artificially curled
hair, that he who ascends to mountain tops will find the loftiest
peaks most wrapped in clouds and snow, he concealed his chilblains
beneath a brave and smiling exterior. He was a lucky man and knew
it, even though he were imitating the Spartan boy with an ice-cream
freezer beneath his doublet frappeeing the region of his heart.

After a brief wedding tour abroad, the couple returned to create a
decided ripple in the calm cistern (so placid and cool and sunless
it is) of the best society. They entertained at their red brick
mausoleum of ancient greatness in an old square that is a cemetery of
crumbled glory. And Robert Walmsley was proud of his wife; although
while one of his hands shook his guests' the other held tightly to
his alpenstock and thermometer.

One day Alicia found a letter written to Robert by his mother. It was
an unerudite letter, full of crops and motherly love and farm notes.
It chronicled the health of the pig and the recent red calf, and
asked concerning Robert's in return. It was a letter direct from
the soil, straight from home, full of biographies of bees, tales of
turnips, paeans of new-laid eggs, neglected parents and the slump in
dried apples.

"Why have I not been shown your mother's letters?" asked Alicia.
There was always something in her voice that made you think of
lorgnettes, of accounts at Tiffany's, of sledges smoothly gliding
on the trail from Dawson to Forty Mile, of the tinkling of pendant
prisms on your grandmothers' chandeliers, of snow lying on a convent
roof; of a police sergeant refusing bail. "Your mother," continued
Alicia, "invites us to make a visit to the farm. I have never seen a
farm. We will go there for a week or two, Robert."

"We will," said Robert, with the grand air of an associate Supreme
Justice concurring in an opinion. "I did not lay the invitation
before you because I thought you would not care to go. I am much
pleased at your decision."

"I will write to her myself," answered Alicia, with a faint
foreshadowing of enthusiasm. "Felice shall pack my trunks at once.
Seven, I think, will be enou