They went over it again. "Thomasine's room, and a guest-room, and my room, and a fine room for Mary Magazine who is coming—Isham having remarried—to look after us, and two baths and a great big library-study-drawing-room, and a little room for what we please, and plenty of closets, and a quiet and good café away up on the roof—Rachel, it's fine!" They sat on a window-seat and Rachel produced a pencil and notebook, and together they tinted the walls and laid rugs and hung pictures and ran bookshelves around and furnished the apartment. "There! that's quiet and perfect and not expensive. As Thomson would say, 'It's quite comme il faut, Miss!'"
"Where is Thomson?"
"Mr. Greer, the artist, has taken him over. He wrote me that he was making thousands, throwing the light on millionaires, and especially millionairesses, and that he wanted Thomson, oh, so badly! He's the type that Thomson likes, and so he joined him two months ago at Newport. Dear old Thomson! Mahomet has gone back to Alexandria."
They looked around the big room. "Soft lights at night and all those twinkling stars out there. It's going to be a dear home."
"You'll have people coming about you. Your own sort—"
Hagar laughed. "What is my sort? Everybody's my sort."
"Writers—artists—"
Hagar pondered the mantel-shelf with a view to what should go above it. "I don't know many of them. I know more of them abroad than here. We're a very isolated kind of craftspeople—each of us more or less on a little Robinson Crusoe island of our own. It may be different in New York, I don't know.... We could do a good deal if we'd put our heads together and push the same wheel."
The apartment was not to be furnished in a day. They worked at it in a restful and leisurely manner, and in the midst of operations, Hagar went to see the Josslyns who had a house up on the Sound.
That afternoon she and the Josslyns walked by the water and watched the white sails gliding by the green and rocky shore, then in the evening sat by a wood fire with cider and apples. Monday to Friday the children were in town at their grandmother's, going to school; Friday afternoon they entered the big living-room like a west wind and danced about with their mother. A little later the whole family would go into town; Christopher had had a course of lectures to write and he was doing it better here. The fire crackled and blazed; at night through the open windows came in a dim sound of waves, with passing lights of boats, and the fragrance of the salt sea, beloved by Hagar. On Monday, when the children had gone, she drove with Molly deep into the sweet countryside, and the two talked as the quiet old horse jogged along.... Molly had taken the advice of the woman at Roger Michael's dinner-party three years and more ago. She was an active member of a suffrage organization, deeply interested, beginning to speak. "I'm a good out-of-doors sort. My voice carries and I don't have to strain it. Of course, we're just beginning out-of-doors speaking. I haven't half the intellect I wish I had, but I can give them good, plain doctrine. It's so common-sense, after all! And Christopher helps so much.... Oh, Hagar, when you're truly mated, it's heaven!"