rations, stains and streaks on the
wall-paper. It would have to be renewed. Already he had decided to
design something to take its place. But last night Peggy had declared
her intention to turn this abode of bachelor comfort into the
drawing-room, and to hand over to his personal use some other
apartment, possibly the present drawing-room, which received all the
blaze and glare of the afternoon sun. What should he do? Live in the
sordidness of discoloured wall-paper for another year, or go through
the anxiety of artistic effort and manufacturers' stupidity and delay,
to say nothing of the expense, only to have the whole thing scrapped
before the wedding? Doggie had a foretaste of the dilemmas of
matrimony. He had a gnawing suspicion that the trim and perfect life
was difficult of attainment.

Then, meandering through this wilderness of dubiety, ran thoughts of
Oliver. Every one seemed to have gone crazy over him. Uncle Edward and
Aunt Sophia had hung on his lips while he lied unblushingly about his
adventures. Even Peggy had listened open-eyed and open-mouthed when he
had told a tale of shipwreck in the South Seas: how the schooner had
been caught in some beastly wind and the masts had been torn out and
the rudder carried away, and how it had struck a reef, and how
something had hit him on the head, and he knew no more till he woke up
on a beach and found that the unspeakable Chipmunk had swum with him
for a week--or whatever the time was--until they got to land. If
hulking, brainless dolts like Oliver, thought Doggie, like to fool
around in schooners and typhoons, they must take the consequences.
There was nothing to brag about. The higher man was the intellectual,
the aesthetic, the artistic being. What did Oliver know of Lydian modes
or Louis Treize decoration or Astec clay dogs? Nothing. He couldn't
even keep his socks from slopping about over his shoes. And there was
Peggy all over the fellow, although before dinner she had said she
couldn't bear the sight of him. Doggie was perturbed. On bidding him
good night, she had kissed him in the most perfunctory manner--merely
the cousinly peck of a dozen years ago--and had given no thought to
the fact that he was driving home in an open car without an overcoat.
He had felt distinctly chilly on his arrival, and had taken a dose of
ammoniated quinine. Was Peggy's indifference a sign that she had
ceased to care for him? That she was attracted by the buccaneering
Oliver?