hink of it with patience. She liked her house so well as it
stood; and it was amply big enough: there was only the pair of them...
and John's child. It had the name, she knew, of being one of the most
comfortable and best-kept in Ballarat. Brick for solidity, where wood
prevailed, with a wide snowy verandah up the posts of which rare
creepers ran, twining their tendrils one with another to form a screen
against the sun. Now, what must Richard do but uproot the creepers and
pull down the verandah, thus baring the walls to the fierce summer
heat; plaster over the brick; and, more outlandish still, add a top
storey. When she came back from Melbourne, where she had gone
a-visiting to escape the upset--Richard, ordinarily so sensitive, had
managed to endure it quite well, thus proving that he COULD put up with
discomfort if he wanted to--when she saw it again, Mary hardly
recognised her home. Personally she thought it ugly, for all its
grandeur; changed wholly for the worse. Nor did time ever reconcile her
to the upper storey. Domestic worries bred from it: the servant went
off in a huff because of the stairs; they were at once obliged to
double their staff. To cap it all, with its flat front unbroken by bay
or porch, the house looked like no other in the town. Now, instead of
passing admiring remarks, people stood stock-still before the gate to
laugh at its droll appearance.

Yet, she would gladly have made the best of this, had Richard been the
happier for it. He was not--or only for the briefest of intervals. Then
his restlessness broke out afresh.

There came days when nothing suited him; not his fine consulting room,
or the improved furnishings of the house, or even her cookery of which
he had once been so fond. He grew dainty to a degree; she searched her
cookery-book for piquant recipes. Next he fell to imagining it was
unhealthy to sleep on feathers, and went to the expense of having a
hard horsehair mattress made to fit the bed. Accustomed to the softest
down, he naturally tossed and turned all night long, and rose in the
morning declaring he felt as though he had been beaten with sticks. The
mattress was stowed away in a lean-to behind the kitchen, and there it
remained. It was not alone. Mary sometimes stood and considered, with a
rueful eye, the many discarded objects that bore it company.
Richard--oddly enough he was ever able to poke fun at himself--had
christened this outhouse "the cemetery of dead fads." Her