“You will envy me my life,” said Arnold.  “I am going out West.  I am going to build my own house.”

“You are joking; you would not think of it seriously,” said Caroline.

“I planned it long ago,” answered Arnold; “it was to be the next act after New York,—­the final act, perhaps.  Scene I:  The Log Cabin.”

“How can you think of it?” exclaimed Caroline.  “Give up everything? your reputation, fortune, everything?”

“New York, in short,” added Arnold.

“Very well, then,—­New York, in short; that is the world,” said Caroline.  “And your music, who is to listen to it?”

“My music?” asked Arnold; “that is of a subjective quality.  A composer, even, need not hear his own music.”

“I don’t understand you,” said Caroline; “and I dare say you are insane.”

“You do not understand me?” asked Arnold, “yet you could read to me all that fantasie I played to you last night.  It was my own composition, and I had not comprehended it in the least.”

“Now you are, satirical,” said Caroline.

“Because you are inconsistent,” pursued Arnold; “you wonder I do not stay here, because my fortune can buy me a handsome house, horses, style and all its elegancies; yet you yourself have found no happiness in them.”

“But I never should find happiness out of them,” answered Caroline.  “It is a pretty amusement for us who have the gold to buy our pleasures with, to abuse it and speak ill of it.  But those who have not it,—­you do not hear them depreciate it so.  I believe they would sell out their home-evenings, those simple enjoyments books speak of and describe so well,—­they would sell them as gladly as the author sells his descriptions of them, for our equipages, our grand houses, our toilet.”

Arnold looked at his neighbor.  Her hands, in their exquisitely fitting lilac gloves, lay carelessly across each other above the folds of the dress with which they harmonized perfectly.  A little sweetbrier rose fell out from the white lace about her face, against the soft brown of her hair.  Arnold pictured Laura gathering just such a rose from the porch she had described by the door of her country-home.

“Would you not have enjoyed gathering yourself that delicate rose that looks coquettish out of its simplicity?” he asked.

“Thank you, no,” Caroline interrupted.  “I selected it from Madame’s Paris bonnets, because it suited my complexion.  If I had picked the rose in the sun, don’t you see my complexion would no longer have suited it?”

“I see you would enjoy life merely as a looker-on,” said Arnold.  “I would prefer to be an actor in it.  When I have built my own house, and have digged my own potatoes, I shall know the meaning of house and potatoes.  My wife, meanwhile, will be picking the roses for her hair.”

“She will be learning the meaning of potatoes in cooking them,” replied Caroline.  “I would, indeed, rather be above life than in it.  I have just enjoyed hearing Lucia sing her last song, and seeing Edgardo kill himself.  I should not care to commit either folly myself.  I pity people that have no money; I think they would as gladly hurry out of their restraints as Brignoli hurries into his everyday suit, after killing himself nightly as love-sick tenor.”