"Dear me, what a miserable flue!" She looked at him discontentedly, as she settled back wearily in her big chair. "And we've really got this house on our hands for a whole year more?" She seemed to feel in this one year the weight of eternity.
"That's what the lease says," he responded, soberly. "What do you say?" his eyes seemed to ask.
She spoke her thoughts presently and at some length. She proposed giving up the house on the first of May. Was it a passing caprice or a serious desire? he wondered.
"'Goodness, George, don't knock the fire all to pieces.'"
"Shall you take your porch and your doors with you?" he asked, with a sorry smile. "They cost enough to be worth considering."
"No," she answered, with the simple literalness that builds a stone wall in a moment. "We shouldn't need them in an apartment-house."
"That's the idea, is it?"
"Yes, it strikes me that that would be the best thing all around—an apartment-house, with a cafe or something. Lots of nice people live that way now. Look at Cecilia Ingles's cousin; she is invited everywhere, and she entertains just the same as if she was in her own house. It's too hard work for me to run things like this, and I've just got to get farther away from this miserable lake."