[Illustration:  THE POOR BUT MODEST ATTORNEY’S COTTAGE]

“Don’t you think the room would look rather bare without a mantel?  You know it’s the most common thing in the world to have them like this.  I can show you a hundred without going out of town.”

“Common!  It’s worse than common; it is vulgar, it is atrocious, it is the sum of all villainies!” said Jill, her indignation rising with each succeeding epithet.  “A fireplace is a sacred thing.  To pretend to have one when you have not is like pretending to be pious when you know you are wicked; it is stealing the livery of a warm, gracious, kindly hospitality to serve you in making a cold, heartless pretense of welcome.”

“I didn’t mean to do anything wrong,” Jack protested with exceeding meekness.  “Such mantels were all the fashion when this house was built, and fashions in marble can’t be changed as easily as fashions in paper flowers.”

“There ought not to be ‘fashions’ in marble, but of course it was fashion.  Nothing else than the blindest of all blind guides could have led people into anything so hopelessly silly and unprincipled.  I shall never enjoy this room again,” she continued, “knowing, as well I know, that yonder stately piece of sculpture is a whited sepulchre, a delusion and a snare.  I shall feel that I ought to unmask it the moment a visitor comes in, lest I should be asked to make a fire on the hearth and be obliged to confess the depravity in our own household.”

[Illustration:  A DOUBLE TEAM.]

“Now, really, my dear, don’t you think you are coming it rather strong, if I may be allowed the expression?  Isn’t it possible that your present views may be slightly tinged by the color of the east wind, so to speak?”

“Not in the least.  You know perfectly well, Jack, that insincerity is the bane of domestic and social life; that hypocrisy is a child of the Evil One, and that vain and false pretensions are the fatal lures that lead us on to destruction.  How can we respect ourselves or expect our friends to respect us if the most conspicuous thing in the house is a palpable fraud?”

“Very well, dear, I’ll bring up a can of nitro-glycerine to-morrow and blow the whole establishment into the middle of futurity.  Meanwhile, let us see if anything can be done to make it endurable a few hours longer.”

Dropping on his knees in front of the fictitious fireplace, Jack pulled the paper from the wall, disclosing a sheet-iron stove-pipe receiver, set there for a time of need, and communicating in some mysterious way with a sooty smoke flue.  Having found this, he telephoned to the stove store for a portable grate—­that is to say, a Franklin stove with ornamental tiles in the face of it—­and in less than an hour the room was radiant with the blaze of a hickory fire, while a hitherto unknown warmth came to the lifeless marble from its new neighbor.  By sitting directly in front of it Jill discovered that in appearance the general effect was nearly as good as that of a genuine fireplace, the warmth diffused being decidedly greater.