the desert. She always says that she cut her teeth on a chunk of adobe, while her father hunted the nests of trap-door spiders out in Sunland. What should I have said when describing a suitable homesite for Peter, Linda?”
“You should have assumed that immediately, Peter,”—Linda lifted her eyes to Morrison's face with a sparkle of gay challenge, and by way of apology interjected—“I am only a kid, you know, so I may call John's friend Peter—you should have assumed that sage and greasewood would simply have vanished from any home location chosen by Peter, leaving it all lacy blue with lilac, and misty white with lemonade bush, and lovely gold with monkey flower, and purple with lupin, and painted blood red with broad strokes of Indian paint brush, and beautifully lighted with feathery flames from Our Lord's Candles, and perfumy as altar incense with wild almond.”
“Oh, my soul,” said Peter Morrison. “Good people, I have located. I have come to stay. I would like three acres but I could exist with two; an acre would seem an estate to me, and my ideas of a house, Henry, are shriveling. I did have a dream of something that must have been precious near a home. There might have been an evanescent hint of flitting draperies and inexperienced feet in it, but for the sake of living and working in such a location as Miss Linda describes, I would gladly cut my residence to a workroom and a sleeping room and kitchen.”
“Won't do,” said Linda. “A house is not a house in California without a furnace and a bathroom. We are cold as blue blazes here when the sun goes down and the salty fog creeps up from the sea, and the icy mist rolls down from the mountains to chill our bones; and when it has not rained for six months at a stretch, your own private swimming pool is a comfort. This to add verisimilitude to what everyone else in Lilac Valley is going to tell you.”
“I hadn't thought I would need a fire,” said Peter, “and I was depending on the ocean for my bathtub. I am particularly fond of a salt rub.”
So far, Eileen had not deigned to enter the conversation. It was all so human, so far from her ideas of entertaining that the disapproval on her lips was not sufficiently veiled to be invisible, and John Gilman, glancing in her direction, realized that he was having the best time he had ever had in the Strong household since the passing of his friends, Doctor and Mrs. Strong, vaguely wondered why. And it occurred to him that Linda and Marian were dominating the party. He said the most irritating thing possible in the circumstances: “I am afraid you are not feeling well this evening, Eileen.”
Eileen laughed shortly.
“The one perfect thing about me,” she said with closely cut precision, “is my health. I haven't the faintest notion what it means to be ill. I am merely waiting for the conversation to take a I turn where I can join in it intelligently.”
“Why, bless the child!” exclaimed Linda. “Can't you talk intelligently about a suitable location for a home? On what subject is a woman supposed to be intelligent if she is not at her best on the theme of home. If you really are not interested you had better begin to polish up, because it appeals to me that the world goes just so far in one direction, and then it whirls to the right-about and goes equally as far in the opposite direction. If Daddy were living I think he would say we have reached the limit with apartment house homes minus fireplaces, with restaurant dining minus a blessing, with jazz music minus melody, with jazz dancing minus grace, with national progress minus cradles.”
“Linda!” cried Eileen indignantly.
“Good gracious!” cried Linda. “Do I get the shillalah for that? Weren't all of us rocked in cradles? I think that the pendulum has swung far and it is time to swing back to where one man and one woman choose any little spot on God's footstool, build a nest and plan their lives in accord with personal desire and inclination instead of aping their neighbors.”
“Bravo!” cried Henry Anderson. “Miss Linda, if you see any suitable spot, and you think I would serve for a bug-catcher, won't you please stake the location?”
“Well, I don't know about that,” said Linda. “Would it be the old case of 'I furnish the bread and you furnish the water'?”
“No,” said Peter Morrison, “it would not. Henry is doing mighty well. I guarantee that he would furnish a cow that would produce real cream.”
“How joyous!” said Linda. “I feel quite competent to manage the bread question. We'll call that settled then. When I next cast an appraising eye over my beloved valley, I shan't select the choicest spot in it for Peter Morrison to write a book in; and I want to warn you people when you go hunting to keep a mile away from Marian's plot. She has had her location staked from childhood and has worked on her dream house until she has it all ready to put the ice in the chest and scratch the match for the living room fire-logs. The one thing she won't ever tell is where her location is, but wherever it is, Peter Morrison, don't you dare take it.”
“I wouldn't for the world,” said Peter Morrison gravely. “If Miss Thorne will tell me even on which side of the valley her location lies, I will agree to stay on the other side.”
“Well there is one thing you can depend upon,” said the irrepressible Linda before Marian had time to speak. “It is sure to be on the sunny side. Every living soul in California is looking for a place in the sun.”
“Then I will make a note of it,” said Peter Morrison. “But isn't there enough sun in all this lovely valley that I may have a place in it too?”
“You go straight ahead and select any location you like,” said Marian. “I give you the freedom of the valley. There's not one chance in ten thousand that you would find or see anything attractive about the one secluded spot I have always hoped I might some day own.”
“This is not fooling, then?” asked Peter Morrison. “You truly have a place selected where you would like to live?”
“She truly has the spot selected and she truly has the house on paper and it truly is a house of dreams,” said Linda. “I dream about it myself. When she builds it and lives in it awhile and finds out all the things that are wrong with it, then I am going to build one like it, only I shall eliminate all the mistakes she has made.”
“I have often wondered,” said Henry Anderson, “if such a thing ever happened as that people built a house and lived in it, say ten years, and did not find one single thing about it that they would change if they had it to build over again. I never have heard of such a case. Have any of you?”
“I am sure no one has,” said John Gilman meditatively, “and it's a queer thing. I can't see why people don't plan a house the way they want it before they build.”
Marian turned to him—the same Marian he had fallen in love with when they were children.
“Mightn't it be,” she asked, “that it is due to changing conditions caused by the rapid development of science and invention? If one had built the most perfect house possible five years ago and learned today that infinitely superior lighting and heating and living facilities could be installed at much less expense and far greater convenience, don't you think that one would want to change? Isn't life a series of changes? Mustn't one be changing constantly to keep abreast of one's day and age?”
“Why, surely,” answered Gilman, “and no doubt therein lies at least part of the answer to Anderson's question.”
“And then,” added Marian, “things happen in families. Sometimes more babies than they expect come to newly married people and they require more room.”
“My goodness, yes!” broke in Linda.
