atural thing that Jimmie should fare forth
on the broad highway--a modern D'Artagnan, a youthful Quixote, an Alan
Breck--!

We hated to have him leave. But he had consolation. "Of course you'll
come and see us. We're going back to my old house in Albemarle. It's a
rotten shack, but Elise says it will be a corking place for me to write.
And you'll all come down for week-ends."

We felt, I am sure, that it was good of him to ask us, but none of us
expected that we should ever go. We had a premonition that Elise
wouldn't want the deadwood of Jimmie's former Division. I know that for
myself, I was content to think of Jimmie happy in his old house. But I
never really expected to see it. I had reached the point of expecting
nothing except the day's work, my dinner at the end, a night's sleep,
and the same thing over again in the morning.

Yet Jimmie got all of us down, not long after he was married, to what he
called a housewarming. He had inherited a few pleasant acres in
Virginia, and the house was two hundred years old. He had never lived in
it until he came with Elise. It was in rather shocking condition, but
Elise had managed to make it habitable by getting it scrubbed very
clean, and by taking out everything that was not in keeping with the
oldness and quaintness. The resulting effect was bare but beautiful.
There were a great many books, a few oil-portraits, mahogany sideboards
and tables and four-poster beds, candles in sconces and in branched
candlesticks. They were married in April, and when we went down in June
poppies were blowing in the wide grass spaces, and honeysuckle rioting
over the low stone walls. I think we all felt as if we had passed
through purgatory and had entered heaven. I know I did, because this was
the kind of thing of which I had dreamed, and there had been a time when
I, too, had wanted to write.

The room in which Jimmie wrote was in a little detached house, which had
once been the office of his doctor grandfather. He had his typewriter
out there, and a big desk, and from the window in front of his desk he
could look out on green slopes and the distant blue of mountain ridges.

We envied him and told him so.

"Well, I don't know," Jimmie said. "Of course I'll get a lot of work
done. But I'll miss your darling old heads bending over the other
desks."

"You couldn't work, Jimmie," Elise reminded him, "with other people in
the room."

"Perhaps not. Did I tell you old dears that I am goi