“You go straight ahead and select any location you like,” said Marian. “I give you the freedom of the valley. There’s not one chance in ten thousand that you would find or see anything attractive about the one secluded spot I have always hoped I might some day own.”
“This is not fooling, then?” asked Peter Morrison. “You truly have a place selected where you would like to live?”
“She truly has the spot selected and she truly has the house on paper and it truly is a house of dreams,” said Linda. “I dream about it myself. When she builds it and lives in it awhile and finds out all the things that are wrong with it, then I am going to build one like it, only I shall eliminate all the mistakes she has made.”
“I have often wondered,” said Henry Anderson, “if such a thing ever happened as that people built a house and lived in it, say ten years, and did not find one single thing about it that they would change if they had it to build over again. I never have heard of such a case. Have any of you?”
“I am sure no one has,” said John Gilman meditatively, “and it’s a queer thing. I can’t see why people don’t plan a house the way they want it before they build.”
Marian turned to him—the same Marian he had fallen in love with when they were children.
“Mightn’t it be,” she asked, “that it is due to changing conditions caused by the rapid development of science and invention? If one had built the most perfect house possible five years ago and learned to-day that infinitely superior lighting and heating and living facilities could be installed at much less expense and far greater convenience, don’t you think that one would want to change? Isn’t life a series of changes? Mustn’t one be changing constantly to keep abreast of one’s day and age?”
“Why, surely,” answered Gilman, “and no doubt therein lies at least part of the answer to Anderson’s question.”
“And then,” added Marian, “things happen in families. Sometimes more babies than they expect come to newly married people and they require more room.”
“My goodness, yes!” broke in Linda. “Just look at Sylvia Townsend—twins to begin with.”