Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill DESSIE JOHN sat on a step-ladder, - mocking her florid husband. "You are as glad as I am, you know you are. Haven't we always wanted to be civilized? And aren't we doing it discreetly? Aren't we hanging our own pictures? If I had been the offspring of frivolity and extravagance that you think me, wouldn't I have paid the people from Crantz's to do it all? Am I not throwing sops all the time to Cerberus? Have I urged you to give up your work? Did I set up a butler when I was sore tempted? Have I even yet been to a good dressmaker? Did I not say to you in an Old Testament voice: 'Philip, Philip, they must be real antiques, against the day when we may have to sell them'? Did I not curb my taste for Louis Quinze and Chinese Chippendale, and sally into lone and dangerous farmhouses, buying the four- post bed from under the hired man and the decrepit mahogany from under the boiled dinner ? Have I not been as clever as a mendicant and as shrinking as a criminal? Colonial I have forced myself to be — though it's not worthy of me; but Braun photographs upon my walls I will not have. There is a point beyond which rolling in the mud is not Christian humility but sheer swinishness. And, above all, Philip of my heart, have I ever for one moment, since luck came, gone back on my manners? 'The Lord our God is a jealous God'; and I have every day tried to prove to Him that luck is good for my soul. I haven't wrestled in prayer — it isn't my way — but I have meant to show that adversity isn't the best and only teacher. Adversity, you know, always spoke Greek, as far as I was concerned. I was getting near the point of collapse. I didn't so much mind eating off fumed oak and sitting in Mission chairs — though they were very uncomfortable — as I did pretending to a lot of people that I like...