“HIGHLAND PLACE” was one of those new little cross-streets in a new little bosky neighbourhood, that had “grown up over night,” as we say, meaning grown up in four or five years; so that when citizens of the older and more solid and soiled central parts of the city come driving through the new part, of a Sunday afternoon in spring, they are pleased to be surprised. “My goodness!” they exclaim. “When did all this happen? Why, it doesn’t seem more’n a year or so since we used to have Fourth o’ July picnics out here! And now just look at it—all built up with bride-and-groom houses!”
“Highland Place” was the name given to this cross-street by the speculative land company that “developed” it, and they did not call it “Waverley Place” because they had already produced a “Waverley Place” a block below. Both “Places” were lined with green-trimmed small white houses, “frame” or stucco; and although the honeymoon suggestion was architecturally so strong, as a matter of fact most of the inhabitants held themselves to be “settled old married people,” some of the couples having almost attained to a Tin Wedding Anniversary.
The largest of the houses in “Highland Place” was the “hollow-tile and stucco residence of Mr. and Mrs. George M. Sullender.” Thus it had been defined, under a photographic reproduction, with the caption “New Highland Place Sullender Home,” in one of the newspapers, not long after the little street had been staked out and paved; and since the “Sullender Home” was not only the largest house but the first to be built in the “Place,” and had its picture in the paper, it naturally took itself for granted as being the most important.
Young Mrs. William Sperry, whose equally young husband had just bought the smallest but most conspicuously bride-and-groom cottage in the whole “Place,” was not so deeply impressed with the Sullender importance as she should have been, since the Sperrys were the newcomers of the neighbourhood, had not yet been admitted to its intimacies, and might well have displayed a more amiable deference to what is established.
“No,” Mrs. Sperry said to her husband, when they got home after their first experience of the “Place’s” hospitality, a bridge-party at the Sullenders’—“I just can’t stand those people, Will. They’re really awful!”
“Why, what’s the matter with ’em?” he inquired. “I thought they were first rate. They seemed perfectly friendly and hospitable and——”
“Oh, yes! Lord and Lady of the Manor entertaining the tenantry! I don’t mind being tenantry,” young Mrs. Sperry explained;—“but I can’t stand the Lord-and-Lady-of-the-Manor style in people with a nine-room house and a one-car garage.”
“It may be one-car,” her husband laughed; “but it has two stories. They have a chauffeur, you know, and he lives in the upstairs of the garage.”
“So that entitles the Sullenders to the Manor style?”
“But I didn’t notice any of that style,” he protested. “I thought they seemed right nice and cordial. Of course Sullender feels that he’s been making quite a success in business and it naturally gives him a rather condescending air, but he’s really all right.”