on the beds of the little house; no other silver glittered so brightly as the silver on their round breakfast-table; no other little white window curtains in London managed to look so perennially fresh, and almost blithe, as the curtains which hung at their windows.  Rosamund and Annie might have conversations together on the subject of “blacks,” but Dion never saw any of these distressing visitants.  The mere thought of Rosamund would surely keep them at a more than respectful distance.

She proved to be a mistress of detail, and a housekeeper whose enthusiasm was matched by her competence.  At first Dion had been rather surprised when he followed from afar, as is becoming in a man, this development.  Before they settled down in London he had seen in Rosamund the enthusiastic artist, the joyous traveler, the good comrade, the gay sportswoman touched with Amazonian glories; he had known in her the deep lover of pure beauty; he had divined in her something else, a little strange, a little remote, the girl to whom the “Paradiso” was a door opening into dreamland, the girl who escaped sometimes almost mysteriously into regions he knew nothing of; but he had not seen in her one capable of absolutely reveling in the humdrum.  Evidently, then, he had not grasped the full meaning of a genuine joie de vivre.

To everything she did Rosamund brought zest.  She kept house as she sang “The heart ever faithful,” holding nothing back.  Everything must be right if she could get it right; and the husband got the benefit, incidentally.  Now and then Dion found himself mentally murmuring that word.  A great love will do such things unreasonably.  For Rosamund’s joie de vivre, that gift of the gods, caused her to love and rejoice in a thing for the thing’s own sake, as it seemed, rather than for the sake of some one, any one, who was eventually to gain by the thing.  Thus she cared for her little house with a sort of joyous devotion and energy, but because it was “my little house” and deserved every care she could give it.  Rather as she had spoken of the small olive tree on Drouva, of the Hermes of Olympia, even of Athens, she spoke of it, with a sort of protective affection, as if she thought of it as a living thing confided to her keeping.  She possessed a faculty not very common in women, a delight in doing a thing for its own sake, rather than for the sake of some human being—­perhaps a man.  If she boiled an egg—­she went to the kitchen and did this sometimes—­she seemed personally interested in the egg, and keenly anxious to do the best by it; the boiling must be a pleasure to her, but also to the egg, and it must, if possible, be supremely well done.  As the cook once said, after a culinary effort by Rosamund, “I never seen a lady care for cooking and all such-like as she done.  If she as much as plucked a fowl, you’d swear she loved every feather of it.  And as to a roast, she couldn’t hardly seem to set more store by it if it was her own husband.”