after Voltaire, who kept pasted up in his window the certificate of the only academic honor he had ever won. Here, as under a tree of life, the old fellow used to sit, sunning himself, as it were, in the glow of single accomplishment. To the passing world he seemed only a snuffy old gentleman dubiously poring over the evening "Figaro," but to one who passed this window in the starred lilac of a Paris twilight it was holy ground. One saluted the dear white scholar's head, one saluted the fellowfighter who had succeeded in grasping one leaf from the great sweet-smelling pile of laurels piled ever higher and higher by a lavish, yet grudging, world.

If one were deliberately to prepare one's window for passing yearners, it would be with a lamp-shade that would give the color of grapes and topazes and light seen through toppling waves and the quiver of sun through a glass of wine. For the day there would be

copy of one's favorite poem. Once in a while, for the sake of auld acquaintance, one would put up a gingerbread man; a Jim Crow, like Miss Hepzibah's, a raisin-eyed gentleman of the old school. Maybe one would have a little cluster of flowers in a glass like the dear coquetries of Contradictory Town; a sprig of lemon verbena, a bit of wild thyme, or once in a while, to give tone and subtlety to one's pane, a great blinking, creamy lotus. On the upper ledge, for the sake of classic significances and for the further beguiling of little boys, one would keep always one big round, sound apple, which, as long as the light lasted, would show fat and spicy and rosy, endowed with that good comfort and cheer which is the apple's own, but which only little boys' eyes can perfectly see.

I tell all this to my brother.

"Hum," he grudges, reading the thermometer-"hum, it's going to be five below to-night. I'll shake the furnace."

T is hard to say why one feels induced, immediately upon arriving in London, to go to housekeeping, unless that great gray town is really the City of Homes, more compelling in its call than the tree-shaded habitations of our country that frequently claim that gentle appellation.

Perhaps I should amend the statement (showing my usual infirmness of purpose) to say that it would be hard to find in normal times why we feel the urge of rushing into the labyrinth of inventories and wordy leases attendant upon the unpacking of one's trunks in one's own English castle. But since the war, to that hothouse plant the American, housekeeping is the only way to keep decently comfortable.

Beechey, who, as ever, had met me at the boat train when our little theatrical company arrived at Euston, was to share in my venture-I then called it adventure among strange customs and peoples. I found her in a barn of a studio, where all living models, even British models, refused to pose for her with the exception of an Eskimo dog that enjoyed himself hugely under the impression that the model stand was an ice-floe.

It was she who discovered the maisonnette, and stood firmly in front of it until the tortured tenants decided to move. She did not define to me this naughty and gay-sounding domicile, and upon gathering the number from her, vaguely, I took Bus 19 out to the square where the maisonette lived, and discovered for myself that its deceptive name was only the basement and main floor of a little house, elsewhere inhabited by an aristocratic landlady.

Still, it looked upon some fine, if

bleak, trees and had a garden in the rear, the bath-room giving access to this pleasant region, and I was assured of a mysterious "geezer," which turned out to be the British pronunciation of "geyser," in the bath-room that streamed hot water after various preliminaries with "taps." Moreover, as Mrs. Wren, my dresser in the theater, declared, it was a good address, "and it was most necessary to have a good address, for then any one can do anything one pleases, madam." I therefore believed myself among the lucky. But that was before the advent of Gladys.

Gladys was Beecher's choice-also Hobson's. My friend and I had made a business arrangement. She liked to call it that, but it is difficult to connect her with anything that has to do with dollars and cents. That my housekeeping would have to do with pounds and pence I thought would make her all the more valuable, for she was to look after the "general" in the kitchen and pay my bills in exchange for a place by my fireside and what the general cooked and served.

I remember with what an air of triumph she bounced into my dressingroom on the eve of the day she had secured Gladys from the registry where I had entered my name and, alas! deposited my fee. In response to a call sent out by the manageress of the intelligence office, so called, two generals had responded: Gladys, who would stay with us all the time, and another, who could come only "now and then like."

My friend admitted that she had engaged Gladys before asking for her character; in fact, she never thought of it at all, as her artistic associates had but few characters among them. And she sought out the blonde manageress

when the maid said she would come for sixteen shillings a week, to whisper that she thought that was too little. The manageress had stared, and when she was sure she had heard aright, advised Beechey to keep the raise for a little encouragement when the range broke down or the sewer backed up.

"Then what did you really learn about her?" I ventured to inquire.

"I learned that she had a beautiful complexion and that she is a soldier's daughter. Her father is in France."

"Oh, well, why did n't you say that before?" I exclaimed, completely satisfied.

The next night I was to move in, and the morning after that, at eight-thirty, Gladys was to be received by Beechey and introduced into the mysteries of studio coffee-making, which my friend contended was best accomplished in a saucepan. All this time I was to be asleep, scarcely awaking as Gladys would creep in noiselessly and start a fire in the drawing-room. Not until my breakfast-tray was brought to my bedside by Gladys, with a pleasant, but deferential, "good morning, madam," was I luxuriously to arouse myself.

BOOM! And yet not a boom. Bang! And yet not a bang. Iron upon iron, but with no metallic reverberation; the echo only in my frightened brain as I sat up in bed in the gray of the morning light and tried to define the assault. Again it came, and I knew it to be a knock on the knocker of the front door. I don't know how the door felt about it, but it had the effect upon me of a blow; to combine the two, a knock-out blow directed at me.

I appreciate now that I should have received the knock-out blow as would a pugilist. I should have fallen straight back upon my pillows and lapsed into unconsciousness. In that fashion I would have demonstrated that I was in no way concerned with the front door and the knocks thereon; that the front door led to the maisonnette, but was not the maisonnette, and that it was the duty of the landlady, snug and warm with her Pomeranians in the room directly above me, either to answer knocks or to discourage them.

But I can never resist an appeal at a front door. I suppose I was a lackey in some earlier period, for I hastily threw a dressing-gown about me, went to the door, and received from the postman a parcel of obviously dying flowers addressed to the lady sleeping above. I put the parcel down on the antique wedding-chest in the hall, and flew back to my cooling bed. I shut my eyes. I put a stocking over them. "You are asleep," I said.

"Blump!" cried a woman's voice down the street. "Blump!" It came nearer. There was a sudden barking. At first it seemed to be the Pomeranians, but, on analysis, it was one large bark rather than two small ones. It was the dog next door protesting at "Blump." Soon the noise came to our door, accompanied by a knock, a different kind of knock, but just as imperative as the postman's, and throwing a fur coat over the dressing-gown, I again answered it. There was no one at the door; nothing but one quart of milk looking up at me boldly (whoever said "as mild as milk"?), with the milk-girl going her wretched way down the street. Once we had milkmaids in the country and milkmen in the city. Now men look after the cows, and girls peddle their commodity; but no matter what the sex, the London street-cry of "Blump," horribly corrupted from "Milk below," continues to add to the horrors of rising. Do you remember in the dead-and-gone days Trilby and her "Milk below," in the actress's best diction? What if Trilby had made her entrance on the stage with "Blump!" like a trained bullfrog! The play would have been a failure; as life at the maisonnette was going to be? I would not admit this.

The milk joined the dead flowers on the chest, and the fur coat, the dressinggown, and I retired. We filled up the bed. "You are asleep," I again told myself.

"Bing!" at the door, followed by tat-tat; then a scuffling sound, as though rats were endeavoring to get through the keyhole. I put the eider-down quilt over the fur-coat over the dressinggown, and went to the door. The paperboy had gone on to exasperate further the dog in the next house, and through

the letter-drop had been shot the morning papers. All of us, including the papers, crowded back into my narrow bed. I put the stocking over my eyes. 'A maisonnette is that portion of a house rented by the householder in order that the tenant may answer the door," I chanted in the fond hope of putting myself to sleep with the idea.

The rage that this thought developed warmed only my head. My feet were freezing. I was too cold to get up and light the oil-stove, and the only picture which soothed my mind, and finally sent me off in a doze, was that of GladysGladys, who would soon be deftly laying the fire for me. How Gladys was to get in I did not know or care. I certainly was not going to let her in. That she did force an entrance, I learned later, was due to her arrival at the same time with the landlady's maid. But from that moment on until I first beheld Gladys kneeling at the grate, my dozing dreams were perforated by staccato whispers in the hall and thousands of feet going up and down the basement steps.

I removed the stocking from my eyes when I was sure Gladys was kneeling at the hearth, and elevated myself upon the pillows to greet her. I saw a young head, wearing an evening coiffure, bound low on the brow with a black velvet ribbon. She was singing "Over There."

"Is that you, Gladys?" I asked by way of greeting, just hoping it might not be.

"Huh?"

"Is this Gladys?" Faintly from me. "Ung-huh."

"Very well, then," I returned firmly, sticking to my original formula. "Good morning, Gladys."

She settled back on her haunches and looked at me; then she candidly gave to an icy world evidence of her first limitation.

"I never could build a fire," confessed Gladys.

I and my wrappings retired under the coverlet for a space, again to emerge; and with a mighty summoning of early Indiana days I arose and showed my handmaiden how to lay the sticks. also produced the fire-lighter, soaked it

I

in the paraffin, and applied a match. The charm worked. Gladys was yawning at it.

"You need not watch it," I said, for I was proud of the thing. "You can bring up the breakfast."

"Huh?"

"Where did you come from?” "From Canada, and I wisht to God I was back there."

"So do I." I was very fervent.

She thought I liked Canada, and grew more sociable.

"I am going to a dance," banging the coal-scuttle against the Queen Anne furniture.

So far as I was concerned, she could have left immediately, but fear of Beechey in the kitchen held me in bounds. "Get the breakfast first."

"All rightee." She made her exit.

After a while the coffee came up, Beechey just behind it, beaming at me. "She's splendid," whispered Beechey. Then I appreciated what I should have known before—that my friend will never see straight, and that she will never suffer greatly from the annoyances of life because of this. That quality is the real "treasure of the humble." If a thing is hers, it is all right. It is all right because it is hers, and Gladys was hers.

We had a few days of horrible cookings and worse service before I returned to the registry to report on the lemongrove for which I had paid a half-crown and a twenty-shilling fee besides. This was done by stealth, for Beechey implored me not to let the girl go until we were sure of some one to take her place. At least she could carry the coal, sweep and dust after a fashion, and do up the dishes at night before going out to her evening dance. That is, she would do them up if Beechey kept her eye on her, I having departed to the theater; but she never went through a motion in the kitchen that could be avoided, although I suppose if a pedometer were strapped to her body, one would learn that at least five miles of lost motions in jazzsteps were recorded every night.

Yet I do not regret the experience with this problem in economics that Great Britain has for the moment to deal with. For the first two years of

the war the fighting Colonials were allowed to bring their families over. So the father of Gladys, a man nearing fifty, and probably of not much use as a warrior, came across, and with him, or after him, in hot pursuit, I imagine, came the useless mother and six children. Three of the children were so young they had to go to school; of the other three one went into the Land Army, and two into service, or such service as they could secure, for they had never been taught anything remotely relating to usefulness of any kind. I could not imagine from what stratum of life they came until my landlady told me that Gladys told her she also was an actress. Then I knew that she belonged to that mean type who hang about the theaters in America in the capacity of supers. I have never known one who has an ounce of real worth in her make-up.

That she and her sister ever went into service at all was because they were starved into it. The glorious color which had so impressed Beechey naturally would impress her, for it was paint. When once besought to rub it off, she did so for the moment, and presented to us a hollow-eyed, gray-faced girl who, as she argued, would never get a job, much less hold it. She knew she was rotten,-that was one of her charms, but her indifference to adopting methods that might make her of value rendered this charm evanescent.

While she was exceptionally inadequate, she is one of the thousands of girls of the same estate in America. They are not brought up with the idea of going into service, therefore they learn nothing of housekeeping, and the net they prepare for the ensnaring of a husband is seldom stronger than a hairnet decorated with ribbon. It was with a deep-burning shame that I, who had come from the United States to escape the endless love lamentations of my youngest woman friend, should be dangling possibilities of a successful catch before the girl if she would only learn from Beechey something of cookery. To be sure, most of the dishes Beechey knew she prepared in a chafing-dish, but they could just as palatably and much more easily have been done on a range.

"I ain't a-goin' to cook forever," was our maid's hopeless reply. And while I might have responded that she was not a-goin' to cook for us as soon as we could better our condition, I did not presume to be saucy until the dream became a business.

This looking forward to marriage and an immediate hired girl of her own is not the evil of England, but that of my country, where we are all ladies, or expect to be, and therefore never cook. And it has little to do with this story beyond, as I have said, that there are hundreds of just such girls now in England, eating food and disseminating their "just-as-good-as-you-and-a-little-bitbetter" notions without any evidence that they are good for anything beyond a good time. These girls now want to go back; they are cold and underfed. As Gladys herself said, "I'll cut my throat if I gotta stick it." But the steamer passage is now too high, and the British Government does not appreciate that dipping into their treasury and sending them home might bring a greater return to the nation than the monetary expenditure would mean a loss.

We kept Gladys on from day to day for several reasons. One was that we could n't do better, another that her father was a soldier, another that Beechey's life was one continual triumph of hope over experience, and the last that Gladys had turned her bedroom into a bower of beauty with a sad little view to remaining permanently.

She undoubtedly liked her place, and we thought at times she might make an effort to earn the money I was expending upon her. But her efforts were ever limited to personal adornment, at its best at a dance, and sadly out of place in a kitchen. She did the entire embellishing of her own room. The piece of carpet to stand upon that my landlady had promised me was never brought down from her stores, and no bit of cracked mirror was ever supplied. I myself brought home from the theater a dressing-room mirror, and took a useless rug from my bedroom to place at her wash-stand. But the landlady, who, if she had not been a lady, I would say "snooped," brought it up-stairs