The houses they passed, hundreds and hundreds of them, filled them
with enthusiasm. Sunday was a pleasant day, in the suburbs. The
youngsters, everywhere, were in white--frolicking about open
garage doors, bareheaded on their bicycles, barefooted beside
beaches or streams. Their mothers, also white-clad, were busy with
agreeable pursuits--gathering roses, or settling babies for naps
in shaded hammocks. Lawn mowers clicked in the hands of the white-
clad men, or a group of young householders gathered for tennis, or
for consultation about a motor-car.

Nancy and Bert began to tentatively ask about rents, to calculate
coal and commutation tickets. The humblest little country house,
with rank neglected grass about it, and a kitchen odorous of new
paint and old drains, held a strange charm for them.

"They could LIVE out-of-doors!" said Nancy, of the children. "And
I want their memories to be sweet, to be homelike and natural. The
city really isn't the place for children!"

"I'd like it!" Bert said, for like most men he was simple in his
tastes, and a vision of himself and his sons cutting grass,
picking tomatoes and watering gooseberry bushes had a certain
appeal. "I'd like to have the Cutters out for a week-end!" he
suggested. Nancy smiled a little mechanically. She did not like
Amy Cutter.

"And we could ask the Featherstones!" she remembered suddenly.

"Gosh! Joe Featherstone is the limit!" Bert said, mildly.