Page:Far from the Maddening Girls.djvu/55

 falling back upon some rag of an apology with which to make things clear.

But her silence at this moment rather impelled me to pity her. When one admiral sinks another’s flagship, he immediately orders his boats lowered away to pick up the survivors, and I have a very similar method of procedure as toward those whom I have worsted in an argument. So now I kindly came back to the original topic.

“The common, or garden, hen,” I said, “which lays in a soap-box filled with straw, of the farmer’s providing, is surely a creature less enviable than the oriole, which constructs its own nest with infinite taste and ingenuity. And so I contend that the man who builds his own house according to his own ideas is more admirable than the man who simply accepts another’s ideas of what a house ought to be. I am building my bungalow around me, as it were, and it is going to fit me to a nicety. To employ a metaphor, I shall be in no fear of