nce, I want no chairs for show. Every spot intended to rest
the human frame in our house shall bring a sigh of relief from the
weary one who sinks into it. I have already started it by the couch I
ordered last week for your study. I went to the man who takes orders
and said: 'Have you ever read "Trilby"?' And he said no, but his wife
had when it was the rage about five years ago. I had brought a copy on
purpose, so I read him that paragraph from the first chapter describing
the studio. Here it is: 'An immense divan spread itself in width and
length and delightful thickness just beneath the big north window, the
business window--a divan so immense that three well-fed, well-contented
Englishmen could all lie lazily smoking their pipes on it at once,
without being in each other's way, and very often did!' He smiled and
said it made very agreeable reading, to which I replied that I wanted
one made just like it."

"What did he say?"

"Well, of course he argued. He wanted to make it a normal size. He
wanted to know the size of the doors it would have to go through, and I
told him it was for an apartment. As soon as he knew that he wanted to
make the lower part of cedar to store furs in for the winter. I said:
'No, no! This is a luxury. There is to be nothing useful about it. I
want the whole inside given up to springs!' He said, 'Turkish?' and I
said yes, and put in two sets of them. At that he began to catch the
spirit of the thing and took an interest. We argued so over the size
of it that finally I told him to send out and measure the elevator and
the door and the room it was to go in and make it just as large as
those spaces would allow. So you'll have a divan ten by six. I wanted
it bigger, but I couldn't have got it through any front door."

"Why, won't it about fill that little room?" asked my husband, with a
trace of anxiety in his tone.

"Only about half-way. There's just room for a little table of books at
one end of the divan, and I'm going to have a movable electric lamp
with a ground-glass globe and a green shade to be good for the eyes.
Your pipe-rack will be on the wall over it. Then by squeezing a little
there will be just room for my writing-chair,--you know the one with
the desk on the arm and the little drawer for note-paper?"

Aubrey got up and came over to where I had my list, and Draper fell to
the floor unnoticed.

"I never heard anything sound so comfortable," he said. The A