In the interests of the novel, he strongly recommended me to take down with me at least one comfortable deck chair, and plenty of lemons.
I could not myself see any reason why we should not be able to think as well on a houseboat as anywhere else, and accordingly it was settled that I should go down and establish myself upon the thing, and that the others should visit me there from time to time, when we would sit round and toil.
This houseboat was Ethelbertha's idea.

We had spent a day, the summer before, on one belonging to a friend of mine, and she had been enraptured with the life.

Everything was on such a delightfully tiny scale.

You lived in a tiny little room; you slept on a tiny little bed, in a tiny, tiny little bedroom; and you cooked your little dinner by a tiny little fire, in the tiniest little kitchen that ever you did see.

"Oh, it must be lovely, living on a houseboat," said Ethelbertha, with a gasp of ecstasy; "it must be like living in a doll's house." Ethelbertha was very young--ridiculously young, as I think I have mentioned before--in those days of which I am writing, and the love of dolls, and of the gorgeous dresses that dolls wear, and of the many-windowed but inconveniently arranged houses that dolls inhabit--or are supposed to inhabit, for as a rule they seem to prefer sitting on the roof with their legs dangling down over the front door, which has always appeared to me to be unladylike: but then, of course, I am no authority on doll etiquette--had not yet, I think, quite departed from her.