The Forrester house sat on the north side of Washington Square. Its high-ceiled walls and hand-carved woodwork, its air of mellowed age were all redolent of days when coaches-and-fours rolling easily through the Square sent flocks of broad-winged pigeons fluttering to safety on the huge, clumsy arch which took its name from the Square. Mimi loved the old-fashioned house it spoke to her in tender tones of the days of splendour it had seen. Jimmie had wanted to dispose of most of the furnishings and furniture but she had restrained him. A new piece or two added to the comfort of the house, new draperies and wallpaper restored the freshness, and they settled down to a comfortable, happy existence together.
Mimi luxuriated in the unaccustomed idleness, in the realization that she had to do nothing she did not want to do. For the first time she realized how long and how hard she had been working. She saw now how steady had been the grind of the past eight years at Francine’s—she had loved it, but now that she saw it in perspective, it made her shudder to see how much of a machine she had become. It had needed the revivifying touch of love to make of her a human being again instead of a coldly inanimate object but little more human than one of the sewing-machines she so often had manipulated. So for months she did little but live the life of the affluent idle, sewing a bit or reading a bit more. She did nothing that could be called work other than supervising the work of her two maids or deciding with the cook what items of food should make up the evening dinner.
In the mornings, negligee-clad, she poured Jimmie’s coffee and commented with more or less interest on the things he read to her, between mouthfuls, from the morning paper. She rather wished he