“Miss Molly, Kent has sent me the plans for my bungalow that I commissioned him at Christmas to get busy on. I wonder if you would care to see them.”
“Of course I’d be charmed to, Professor Green. There is nothing in the world that is more interesting to me than plans of a house. Kent and I have been drawing them ever since we could hold pencils. Kent was the master hand at outside effects, and I was the housekeeper, who must have the proper pantry arrangements and conveniences.”
“Well, please pass on these. The outside effects seem lovely to me, but I cannot tell about the interior.”
Molly seated herself and pored over the prints, soon mastering the details with a practiced eye, noting dimensions and windows and doors.
“I think it is splendid, but do you really want my criticism?”
“I certainly do, more than any one’s.”
“Well, there is waste space here that should be put in the store room. This little passage from dining-room to kitchen is entirely unnecessary and should be incorporated in the butler’s pantry. These twin doors in the hall, one leading to the attic and one to the cellar, are no doubt very pretty, but they are not wide enough. An attic is for trunks, and how could one larger than a steamer trunk get through such a narrow door? A cellar is certainly for barrels and the like, and I am sure it would be a tug to pull a barrel through this little crack of a door. I’d allow at least nine inches more on each door, and that means a foot and a half off something. Let me see. It seems a pity to take it off of the living-room, and rather inhospitable to rob the guest chamber.
“Aunt Clay always puts the new towels in the guest chamber for the company to break in. She says company can’t kick about the slick stiffness of them, and somehow it would seem rather Aunt Clayish to take that eighteen inches off of the poor unsuspecting guests, whoever they may be.”
Molly sat a long time studying the plans, and she looked so sweet and so earnest that Edwin Green thought with regret of the tacit promise he had made Mrs. Brown: to let Molly stay a child for another year. How he longed to know his fate! How simple it would be while she was showing her interest in his little bungalow to ask her to tell him if she thought she could ever make it her little home, too! Was she the child her mother thought her? Did she think he was a “laggard in love,” and despise him for a “faint heart”? Or could it be that she thought of him only as an old and trusted friend, too ancient to contemplate as anything but a professor of literature, and, at that, one who was building a home in which to spend his rapidly declining years?
“Time will tell,” sighed the poor, conscientious young man, “but if I am letting my happiness slip through my fingers from a mistaken sense of duty, then I don’t deserve anything but ‘single blessedness’.”