As I looked at her I felt not at all like smiling.

“I know,” she was saying, “it does have a humorous side.  I can see that.  Dick has seen it all along.  Do you know, although Dick pretends to pooh-pooh everything intellectual, he has a really penetrating mind.”

I had a sudden vision of Dick in his old smoking jacket, standing in the midst of the immaculate cottage that was once a barn, holding his pipe with one finger crooked around the stem just in front of his nose in the way he had, and smiling across at me.

“Have you deserted the cottage entirely?”

“Oh, we may possibly go back in the spring-----” She paused and looked
into the fire, her fine, strong face a little sad in composure, full of
thought.

“I am trying to be honest with myself David.  Honest above everything else.  That’s fundamental.  It seems to me I have wanted most of all to learn how to live my life more freely and finely....  I thought I was getting myself free of things when, as a matter of fact, I was devoting more time to them than ever before-and, besides that, making life more or less uncomfortable for Dick and the children.  So I’ve taken my courage squarely in my hands and come back here into this blessed old home, this blessed, ugly, stuffy old home—­I’ve learned that lesson.”

At this, she glanced up at me with that rare smile which sometimes shines out of her very nature:  the smile that is herself.

“I found,” she said, “that when I had finished the work of becoming simple—­there was nothing else left to do.”

I laughed outright, for I couldn’t help it, and she joined me.  How we do like people who can laugh at themselves.

“But,” I said, “there was sound sense in a great deal that you were trying to do.”

“The fireplace smoked; and the kitchen sink froze up; and the cook left because we couldn’t keep her room warm.”

“But you were right,” I interrupted, “and I am not going to be put off by smoking fireplaces or chilly cooks; you were right.  We do have too much, we are smothered in things, we don’t enjoy what we do have—­”

I paused.

“And you were making a beautiful thing, a beautiful house.”

“The trouble with making a beautiful thing,” she replied, “is that when you have got it done you must straightway make another.  Now I don’t want to keep on building houses or furnishing rooms.  I am not after beauty—­I mean primarily—­what I want is to live, live simply, live greatly.”

She was desperately in earnest.

“Perhaps,” I said, feeling as though I were treading on dangerous ground, “you were trying to be simple for the sake of being simple.  I wonder if true simplicity is ever any thing but a by-product.  If we aim directly for it, it eludes us:  but if we are on fire with some great interest that absorbs on lives to the uttermost, we forget ourselves into simplicity, Everything falls into simple lines around us, like a worn garment.”