"I don't know, Mrs. Lathrop," she said, coming back to her seat, "I d'n know, I'm sure, as I'm took with this idea a tall. I never was one for favors either given or asked, and although I know this isn't no favor, but just a evidence of what I've been through with you first and last, still it's done in spite of me and I've got no feeling that I'm going to enjoy it. There's something about kindness as is always most trying to the people who've got no choice but to stand up and be tried. People who get freely given to is in the habit of getting what they don't want and can't use, but I ain't. I'm very far from it. There's nothing in me that's going to be pleased with getting a green hat when I needed a pink coat—no, sir.
"And I don't need nothing. Or if I do, I can buy it. I know Jathrop means it kindly, but Jathrop can't enter into my ways of thinking. Jathrop is looking into life from the Klondike gold-fields and I'm looking at it from my back stoop. That young man was out swishing his pocket handkerchief about and sucking his thumb and holding it up all yesterday afternoon, and about the time I'd made up my mind to bolt him out of the kitchen for a lunatic, he come in and told me he really thought there was wind enough in your back yard and my back yard together to run a windmill, in which case a water system could be easy inaugurated. I told him I didn't know you could inaugurate anything but a president, but he said anything as you hadn't had before and thought was going to work fine and be a great improvement could be inaugurated. I told him I supposed I could stand a windmill if you could.
"What do you think—what do you think, Mrs. Lathrop, if that young man didn't ask if he might go and look up the parlor fireplace! Well, I told him he could, and I give him a newspaper to shake his head on after he was done looking, too. He's been in my garret until I bet he knows every trunk label by heart, and I must say I feel as if I'd have very little of my own affairs to tell on Judgment Day if he gets dressed and out of his grave quicker than I get dressed and out of mine. But that isn't all, whatever you may think. There's a many other things about him as I don't like and don't like a tall.
"For one thing, he's got a way of looking around as if it was my house that was the main thing and I was the last and smallest piece of cross-paper tied in the kite's tail. To my order of thinking, that's a far from polite way for a young man as Jathrop's hiring and boarding to look on a woman whose house he may thank his lucky stars if he may get the chance to build over. Mrs. Macy says Mrs. Lupey says architects is all like that, but I'm far from seeing why. I don't consider that young man superior a tall. I consider his brains as very far from being equal to my own. When he asks me to hold the other end of his tape-line and does it just as if a pin would do as well, only I was handier at the moment, I'm very far from feeling flattered. I never saw just such a young man before, and when I think of being delivered up to him—house and all—for the summer, I'm also very far from feeling easy. I d'n know, I'm sure, what will be the end of this, but I do know that it looks to me like a pretty bad business."
Susan paused again and looked at her friend, but Mrs. Lathrop just rocked onward. Life had widened so tremendously for her that she couldn't possibly be perturbed in any way or by anything. If the roof fell in, Jathrop would buy her another, and if she were smashed by it, Jathrop would have her put together again. Why worry?
The young man remained ten days in all, and when his visit of investigation was completed, he returned to New York. Jathrop took him to the Lotus Club to wash and to the Yacht Club to lunch and to Claremont in the afternoon (in his motor), and they talked it all over. The young man had his sketches, ideas, ideals, and plans all tied into a neat patent cover with cost-estimates lightly glued in the back. Jathrop was deeply interested, and the young man expounded the inmost soul of all his measurements and proposed altitudes and alterations. The young man reminded Jathrop of his pertinent hypothesis that a house should express its owner. Jathrop's own view of "express" was that if you could pay the bill, it beat freighting all out of sight, but he felt that perhaps the young man meant something different, so he merely gave him a cigar.
The young man took the cigar and proceeded to elucidate his hypothesis by explaining that, having carefully studied both Mrs. Lathrop and Miss Clegg, he should suggest that Miss Clegg's house express her by being severely Doric and that Mrs. Lathrop's should be rambling and Queen Anne with wide, free floor spaces. He further suggested a hyena-headed door-knocker for Miss Clegg and an electric button to press, so that the door opened of itself for Mrs. Lathrop. Also a roofless pergola to connect the two houses. Jathrop liked all his ideas and sketches very much, but as he was really good-hearted and had not the least desire to present green hats to those who wanted pink coats, he had the whole book sent down to his mother and begged her to carefully inspect it in company with Susan Clegg. They inspected it.
"Well," said Susan, "all I can say is I'll have to carry this book home and sit down and try and make out what he does mean. He's done it very neat, that I will say, but between crosses and dotted lines and your house behind mine like two Roman emperors on a cameo pin, I can't make head or tail of what's going to be done to either of us. I can't even find my own house in this plan on some pages, and as for this bird-cage walk that I'm supposed to run back and forth in like a polar bear in a circus all day long, my own opinion is that if it's got no roof, it's going to be very hard indeed about the snow in winter, for I'll have to carry every single solitary shovelful to one end or the other so as to throw it out of either your kitchen window or mine. That's all the good that will do us."
Mrs. Lathrop swung to and fro, totally unconcerned. No sort of proposition could disconcert her now. If the house when built over proved a failure, Jathrop would build her another.
Susan took the prettily-bound portfolio home with her and spent the evening over it. She studied it profoundly and to some purpose, for the next morning when she brought it back to Mrs. Lathrop, it held but few secrets, other than those of a purely technical character, for her.