ords amount to!

CHAPTER XVI

FRANCES READS MY BOOK.

A great extravagance of mine lies in the fact that I pay my board here,
for the sake of Mrs. Milliken, and take a good many of my meals outside,
for mine. Strange as it may seem to the inveterately domestic, I enjoy a
little table of my own, with a paper or a book beside me and the utter
absence of the "please pass the butter" or "I'll trouble you for the
hash" of the boarding-house.

Hence, I rose from my chair for another refection outside and debated as
to whether I might venture out without my overcoat, when Frieda came out
of Frances's room and penetrated mine.

"She is all right now," I was informed. "Her headache has quite left
her, and Madame Smith has been in to inform her that the shop is to be
opened to-morrow. So I have told Frances she had better continue to lie
down and have a good rest. I may come in again, later this afternoon,
for a cup of tea."

"You are a million times welcome to it," I said, "but you will have to
make it yourself. I have to go over to my sister's where there is
another blessed birthday. I shall have to go out now and pick out a
teddy bear or a Noah's ark. I am afraid they will keep me until late.
Give Frances my love and insist on her going out to-morrow evening with
us, to Camus."

"Very well, I certainly will," answered Frieda, bending over with much
creaking of corset bones. "What are these books on the floor? You ought
to be ashamed of yourself for ill-treating valuable, clean volumes."

"They may be clean, but I doubt their value," I said. "They're only
copies of the 'Land o' Love.'"

"What a pretty cover design, but the girl's nose is out of drawing. Sit
right down and sign one of them for me and I want to take another to
Frances. It will help her to pass away the time."

I obeyed, decorating a blank page with my illegible hieroglyphics, and
repeated the process on a second copy for Frances, after which I
departed.

Goodness knows that I love the whole tribe of my sister's young ones,
and my sister herself, and hold her husband in deep regard. He is a
hard-working and inoffensive fellow, who means well and goes to church
of a Sunday. He proudly introduces me as "my brother-in-law the author,"
and believes all he sees in his morning paper. Despite all this, I abhor
the journey to their bungalow although, once I have reached it, I
unquestionably enjoy the atmosphere of serene home life. The infants
climb