“So splendidly?” Harlan repeated, and he stared at her. “But you don’t take what Dan says seriously, do you? You don’t think that just because he says——”
“I haven’t seen him, Harlan.”
“But you speak as if you believe he’s actually succeeding in making that old fantasia of his into a reality.”
“Well,” she said, “isn’t he?”
“What? Why, he’s still just barely keeping his head above water. He sells vacant lots out there, yes—but to keep on selling them he has to put all they sell for into developing the land he hasn’t sold. It amounts precisely to the same thing as giving the property away. His mortgages used to worry him to death, but he’s got most of the place mortgaged now for three times what it was five years ago. You see——”
“I see that the land must be worth three times as much as it was five years ago, since he can borrow three times as much on it.”
“But, my dear Martha——”
“But, my dear Harlan!” she echoed mockingly, and thus disposed of his argument before he could deliver it. “The truth is, you’ve had the habit of undervaluing Dan so long that you can’t get over it. You can’t see that at last he’s begun to make a success of his ‘fantasia.’ Given time enough, critics who aren’t careful to keep themselves humble-minded always lose the power to see things as they are.”
Harlan winced a little under this sententious assault, and laughed at himself for wincing; then explained his rather painful laughter. “It’s almost amusing to me to find myself still cowering away from your humble-minded criticisms of me—just as I used to, Martha!”
“Yes, I know it,” she admitted. “I hate myself for the way I talk to you, Harlan;—somehow you always make me smug and superior. I’m the foolish kind of person who’s always made critical by superior criticism—critical of the critic, I mean.”