finding a contractor who would build us a house at our price.
Will and I adored our first little home, of course, but then there were disadvantages. Every time it rained I had to put a basin in the middle of my bed—in case the roof leaked—and the fireplaces did smoke when you first lit them, and the kitchen stove did need a new lining. The owner was awfully disagreeable about repairs, and after we had been vainly pleading for three months solid for a new brick or two in a disabled chimney, which threatened to burn down the house, we began to consider moving. We didn't intend to build. We thought it would cost too much. We didn't even intend to buy. We simply wanted to find something better to rent.
Rummaging about among second-hand houses is very depressing, I can tell you. Some of the same old arks that had been on the market when we were first married, were still without a master, like certain wrecks of servants who haunt intelligence-offices. Dilapidated run-down old things—I hate the very thought of them! They have a musty, dead-rat sort of odour that's far from welcoming when you enter their darkened halls. You always wonder if it's the plumbing and ask why the last people left. And oh, the closets in those houses—little, black horrid holes! I used to pull open their doors, and time and again find some sort of human paraphernalia left behind on one of the hooks—a man's battered straw hat, or once, I remember, a solitary pair of discarded corsets. Spattered places in the bedrooms, paths worn on the hardwood floors, ink spots, grease spots, and on the walls an accurate pattern of the arrangement of the
