October yielded to November.  By good fortune the weather remained sunny, but the nights were crisp.  Belinda was given an oil-stove for her attic bedroom.  Mrs. Blackwell heard no more complaints of the cold, but sometimes she and her husband could hear uneasy creakings upstairs late at night.  “I wonder if Barbados really is so warm?” she asked Bob.  “I’m sure it can’t be warmer than Belinda’s room.  She never opens the windows, and the oil-stove has to be filled every morning.”

“Perhaps some day we can get an Eskimo maid,” suggested Mr. Blackwell drowsily.  He wore his Palm Beach suit every night for dinner, but underneath it he was panoplied in heavy flannels.

* * * * *

Through Mr. Chester the rumour of the Blackwells’ experiment in psychology spread far among suburban husbands.  On the morning train less fortunate commuters, who had already started their fires, referred to him as “the little brother of the iceberg.”  Mr. and Mrs. Chester came to dinner on the 16th of November.  Both the men loudly clamoured for permission to remove their coats, and sat with blanched and chattering jaws.  Mr. Blackwell made a feeble pretence at mopping his brow, but when the dessert proved to be ice-cream his nerve forsook him.  “N-no, Belinda,” he said.  “It’s too warm for ice-cream to-night.  I don’t w—­want to get chilled.  Bring me some hot coffee.”  As she brought his cup he noticed that her honest brown brow was beaded with perspiration.  “By George,” he thought, “this mental suggestion business certainly works.”  Late that evening he lit the log fire and revelled by the blaze in an ulster.

The next evening when Mr. Blackwell came home from business he met the doctor in the hall.

“Hello, doc,” he said, “what’s up?”

“Mrs. Blackwell called me in to see your maid,” said the doctor.  “It’s the queerest thing I’ve met in twenty years’ practice.  Here it is the 17th of November, and cold enough for snow.  That girl has all the symptoms of sunstroke and prickly heat.”

MY FRIEND

To-day we called each other by our given names for the first time.

Making a new friend is so exhilarating an adventure that perhaps it will not be out of place if I tell you a little about him.  There are not many of his kind.

In the first place, he is stout, like myself.  We are both agreed that many of the defects of American letters to-day are due to the sorry leanness of our writing men.  We have no Chestertons, no Bellocs.  I look to Don Marquis, to H.L.  Mencken, to Heywood Broun, to Clayton Hamilton, and to my friend here portraited, to remedy this.  If only Mr. Simeon Strunsky were stouter!  He is plump, but not yet properly corpulent.

My friend is a literary journalist.  There are but few of them in these parts.  Force of circumstances may compel him to write of trivial things, but it would be impossible for him not to write with beauty and distinction far above his theme.  His style is a perfect echo of his person, mellow, quaint, and richly original.  To plunder a phrase of his own, it is drenched with the sounds, the scents, the colours, of great literature.