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166 “It always frets me to have things mislaid that I am used to seeing around. When you change the furnishings about, it upsets me.”

“Do you look upon Jarvis as furniture?” she teased him.

“I look upon him as an anomaly.”

“How so?”

“William Morris said, ‘You should never have anything in your house which you do not know to be useful, and believe to be beautiful.’”

“I think Jarvis is beautiful.”

“That great mammoth?”

“He’s like Apollo, or Adonis.”

“He certainly needs all Olympus to stretch out on. He clutters up this little house.”

“I am sorry you don’t like Jarvis, Professor.”

“I do like him. I am used to him. I enjoy disagreeing with him. I wish he would come home.”

His daughter beamed on him.

“Then he is also useful as a whetstone upon which you sharpen your wits. William Morris had nothing on me when I added Jarvis to our Penates.”

Jarvis’s first letter she read aloud to her father, and they both laughed at it, it was so Jarvis-like.