It was not as big as the White House, yet it could not be called small.  I had seen, to that.  The long facade was imposing, dignified, with a touch of conventionality and solidity in keeping with my standing in the city.  It was Georgian, of plum-coloured brick with marble trimmings and marble wedges over the ample windows, some years later I saw the house by Ferguson, of New York, from which Archie had cribbed it.  At one end, off the dining-room, was a semicircular conservatory.  There was a small portico, with marble pillars, and in the ample, swift sloping roof many dormers; servants’ rooms, Archie explained.  The look of anxiety on Maude’s face deepened as he went over the floor plans, the reception-room; dining room to seat thirty, the servants’ hall; and upstairs Maude’s room, boudoir and bath and dress closet, my “apartments” adjoining on one side and the children’s on the other, and the guest-rooms with baths....

Maude surrendered, as one who gives way to the inevitable.  When the actual building began we both of us experienced, I think; a certain mild excitement; and walked out there, sometimes with the children, in the spring evenings, and on Sunday afternoons.  “Excitement” is, perhaps, too strong a word for my feelings:  there was a pleasurable anticipation on my part, a looking forward to a more decorous, a more luxurious existence; a certain impatience at the delays inevitable in building.  But a new legal commercial enterprise of magnitude began to absorb me at his time, and somehow the building of this home—­the first that we possessed was not the event it should have been; there were moments when I felt cheated, when I wondered what had become of that capacity for enjoyment which in my youth had been so keen.  I remember indeed, one grey evening when I went there alone, after the workmen had departed, and stood in the litter of mortar and bricks and boards gazing at the completed front of the house.  It was even larger than I had imagined it from the plans; in the Summer twilight there was an air about it,—­if not precisely menacing, at least portentous, with its gaping windows and towering roof.  I was a little tired from a hard day; I had the odd feeding of having raised up something with which—­momentarily at least—­I doubted my ability to cope:  something huge, impersonal; something that ought to have represented a fireside, a sanctuary, and yet was the embodiment of an element quite alien to the home; a restless element with which our American atmosphere had, by invisible degrees, become charged.  As I stared at it, the odd fancy seized me that the building somehow typified my own career....  I had gained something, in truth, but had I not also missed something? something a different home would have embodied?

Maude and the children had gone, to the seaside.