stool! I get a good deal of vicarious satisfaction out of it. I hope that is the right word. I am never quite sure about 'vicarious.'"
She wrote back that he must not. The idea of furnishing a house for her! "It seems so complacent, Crispin. As if you just had to crook your finger!"
His response to that was: "If crooking my finger would do the trick, I'd have it permanently crippled. But I am not complacent. There are nights when I walk the floor in a deadly funk, my imagination playing with the idea that you are falling in love with somebody else. If that ever happens, Hildegarde, don't tell me. Just send back the silver key. And I'll know you are never going to sit by my fires, nor toast your slippers at my hearth."
Hildegarde found her mind dwelling rather persistently on the thought of that fireplace and Crispin in front of it. She didn't want to think about it, but there it was, popping up at the most unexpected moments in the midst of Sally's chatter or of Bobby's jests.
Then one day, when, with a lot of others, she was having tea in the art gallery of Winslow's house, she came across a picture of George Washington! It had, apparently, just been hung, and was unlike any other portrait she had seen of the father of his country. It gave him less the look of a graven image and more the look of a human being. Here were the tired eyes, the irritated frown of the harassed officer, the coarse skin of the man whom the storms had beaten and the cold hardened. He wore a shabby coat, his hair was wind-blown, and there was something in his expression which reminded her of Crispin as he had been that day under
