She had hoped for this, had led him into it. “Papa’s going to begin building an extension of the Tennessee Avenue car line next month,” she said. “I forced him to admit how far out it would run.”
“Not so far as the Addition?”
“Within an eighth of a mile of it,” said Martha. “That’s what made him so noisy!”
CHAPTER XX
HARLAN was astonished, but he took his little defeat well; and Martha in turn encountered a surprise, for he showed a discomfited kind of pleasure. “So Ornaby Addition’s going to get its rapid transit at last,” he said. “That’s not so bad, you know. Why, Dan might come out pretty well on the thing after all!”
“But doesn’t that annoy you, Harlan?” she asked.
“You mean that I want to see my brother beaten? That I really haven’t good will toward him?”
“No, indeed I don’t. I mean: Wouldn’t it annoy you to find you’d always been mistaken about him?”
“But I’m not. I grew up in the same house with him, and I ought to know him. If he does happen to do anything with his wild old idea after all, it’ll be by the grace of a series of miracles no one could possibly have foreseen.”
“That is to say,” Martha observed, “you’d call him ‘a fool for luck.’ ”