“Quite so,” said Jevons.  “And in that case you’ve got to raise the ceiling four inches.”

“No, sir,” said the carpenter (he spoke severely to Jevons).  “You ’ave not.  If I take you off a two inch from each leg of that there bedstead, and a two inch from each of them there postsis, it’ll be the same as if the builder ‘e raised you the ceilin’ a four inch.”

“By Jove,” said Jevons.  “So it will.”

“Ay, and it’ll corst you somethin’ like four shillin’, instead of p’raps a matter of forty pound.  W’en it comes to tamperin’ with ceilin’s, you never know where you are.”

“I don’t know where I am now,” said Jevons, “but it might be better to leave the ceiling alone.  They haven’t started tampering, have they?”

“No, sir.  They have not.”

Viola ordered the carpenter to go into the study again and measure for those bookshelves.  He was her slave and he went.

“Jimmy’s been going on like that all day,” she said.  “He’s taken up hours of that man’s time.  We shall never get him out of the house.”

“I don’t want to get him out of the house,” said Jevons.  “I’m awfully happy with him.”

He was happy (like a child) with everything, with his house and his garden and his furniture, his oak chests and the dresser and the bureau, above all he was happy with his bed-tester.  He said be had never slept under a bed-tester in his life, and he was dying to know what it would be like—­to lie there with hundreds of dear little, shy little chintz rosebuds squinting down at you.

“You’ll not lay under them rosebuds, not for a twenty-four hour—­”

The carpenter had come back to us.  He treated Jevons exactly like a child.

“That tester can’t be set up to-night.  Not unless, as I say, you squeeges of it jam tight between the ceilin’ and the floor.  An’ then you’ll ’ave to prise the ceilin’ up every time you moves of it, else you’ll start them postsis all a twistin’ and a rockin’, an’ ’ow’ll you feel then?”

Jevons said he felt frightened to death as it was, and the carpenter could have it his own way provided he didn’t hurt the little rosebuds or frighten them; and the carpenter sighed and said that the study was ten by thirteen and would take a hundred and sixteen feet of bookshelves.

“Let’s go and look at the study,” said Viola.  And we went and looked at it.  And the carpenter came up and looked at us.  And the foreman and the other men came in with furniture and things out of the garden, and they looked at us.  There wasn’t one really large and heavy piece of furniture except the four-post bed and the tester, and they treated the whole thing as a joke, as a funny game they were helping two small children to play at.  And when Viola and Jevons ought to have been telling the men what things were to go into which room and where, they ran back into the garden to see what flowers they would plant in it and where.