"Yes, a year's option. It was rather an underhanded trick that I played on old Damon, but he's not very angry about it. It's my first business venture.
"You see, I learned through a letter from a girl friend in San Francisco that a big cement company was thinking of invading this country. She wrote it merely as a bit of entertaining news, but I looked at it differently.
"I knew where they'd begin their invasion. Right here! That magnificent monument there is solid limestone, and the hills back of it are the same, though covered by a thin layer of soil. So I went to the owner of the land, Damon Tamroy, and got a year's option on it for twenty-five dollars—a hundred and sixty acres.
"How Damon laughed at me! I told him outright why I wanted to buy the land, if ever I could scrape enough together. He didn't consider it very valuable, and it may become mine any day this year that I can pungle up four hundred and seventy-five bucks more. When he quizzed me, I told him frankly that I was doing it in an effort to preserve Lime Rock for posterity, and he laughed louder than ever.
"But he changed his tune when a representative of the cement company approached him with an offer of fifteen dollars an acre. He took his loss good-naturedly enough, but accused me of putting over a slick little business deal on him. I had done so, in a way, and admitted it; and ever since I've been talking myself blue in the face when I meet him, trying to convince him that it's not the money I'm after at all.
"Think of an old hog of a cement company coming in here and erecting a rumbling old plant, with the noon whistle deriding the reverential calm of this magnificent cañon, and their old drills and dynamite and things ripping Lime Rock from its throne! Bah! I'm going to San Francisco soon to get a job. I may decide to go this week. It will keep me hustling to put away four hundred and seventy-five dollars between now and the day my option expires."
Oliver sat looking gravely at the young idealist, suppressing his disappointment over the possibility of her early departure.
"But we have to have cement," he pointed out.
"Do we? Maybe so. But there's lots of limestone in the west. Men don't need to search out such spots as this in which to get it. There are less picturesque places, which will yield enough cement material for all our needs. Sometimes I think these big money-grabbers just love to ruin Nature with their old picks and powder. You may agree with me or not—I don't care. I'm not utilitarian, and don't care who knows it. The world's against me in my big fight to keep the money hogs from robbing life of all its poetry; but it's a fight to the last ditch! I'll save Lime Rock, anyway, if I have to beg and borrow."
"I don't know that I disagree with you at all," he told her softly. "Money doesn't mean a great deal to me. I've shed no idle tears over my failure to inherit the money that I expected would be mine at Dad's death. I hold no ill will toward Dad. There's too much wampum in the world today. It won't buy much. The more people have the more they want. The so-called 'standard of living' continues to rise, and with it the ills of our civilization steadily increase. Luxuries ruin health. Automobiles make our muscles sluggish. Moving pictures clog our thinking apparatus. Telephones make us lazy. Phonographs and piano-players reduce our appreciation of the technique of music, which can come only by study and practice. What flying machines will do to us remains to be seen, but they'll never carry us to heaven!