wouldn't want the deadwood of Jimmie's former Division. I know that for
myself, I was content to think of Jimmie happy in his old house. But I
never really expected to see it. I had reached the point of expecting
nothing except the day's work, my dinner at the end, a night's sleep,
and the same thing over again in the morning.

Yet Jimmie got all of us down, not long after he was married, to what he
called a housewarming. He had inherited a few pleasant acres in
Virginia, and the house was two hundred years old. He had never lived in
it until he came with Elise. It was in rather shocking condition, but
Elise had managed to make it habitable by getting it scrubbed very
clean, and by taking out everything that was not in keeping with the
oldness and quaintness. The resulting effect was bare but beautiful.
There were a great many books, a few oil-portraits, mahogany sideboards
and tables and four-poster beds, candles in sconces and in branched
candlesticks. They were married in April, and when we went down in June
poppies were blowing in the wide grass spaces, and honeysuckle rioting
over the low stone walls. I think we all felt as if we had passed
through purgatory and had entered heaven. I know I did, because this was
the kind of thing of which I had dreamed, and there had been a time when
I, too, had wanted to write.

The room in which Jimmie wrote was in a little detached house, which had
once been the office of his doctor grandfather. He had his typewriter
out there, and a big desk, and from the window in front of his desk he
could look out on green slopes and the distant blue of mountain ridges.

We envied him and told him so.

"Well, I don't know," Jimmie said. "Of course I'll get a lot of work