CHAPTER V
Philip Blair and Stacey had been hunting houses. Catherine and the boys were to come on when one had been found and enough furniture rented to live with until their own could be shipped.
Houses to let were scarce, applicants numerous, and rents high. But Stacey employed obstinate pressure and actually presented his friend with a choice of three. Which, better than anything else, indicates the position of the Carroll family in Vernon.
The thing was done, the lease signed, and the agent had left them; but Phil and Stacey stood for a little while on the wooden porch of Phil’s new house, looking down at the city.
Vernon was, for the most part, flat, but one hill of moderate eminence it did possess, which, in the narrow early days when the city was young and a man was deemed successful if he had at sixty amassed a fortune of a hundred thousand dollars, had been the supreme centre of fashion, as was evidenced by the towers (to say nothing of the lightning rods) on the now dingy frame houses. Stacey himself had lived on this hill when a small boy, and the school he had attended still crowned it. But those were the days when Vernon’s best citizens boasted that Vernon had a population of a hundred thousand (which it did not have). Now Vernon had two hundred and twenty-five or perhaps two hundred and fifty thousand, and its best citizens did not much care. The crowded business section had flowed to the foot of the hill and even burst like a wave upon it, spattering its slopes with small garages and second-rate shops. Noise rose and the odor of smoke. Fashion had long since departed—to the edge of the city, where the Carrolls lived, or still farther, to the hills that rose beyond.
Stacey withdrew his eyes from the prospect and glanced sharply about him at the porch, the steps, and the small front yard. “Sordid kind of place to have to live in,” he remarked. “Sorry I can’t get anything better for you.”
Philip Blair smiled his pleasant gentle smile. “You know you don’t think that, Stacey,” he returned. “You’re only saying what you take to be the proper thing. At heart you don’t feel that it matters in the least where one lives.”
“No, I suppose not,” Stacey assented absently. He was again staring off at the city. It stretched out, monotonous and unbroken save where the afternoon sunlight glittered on the two converging branches of its sluggish river.
“I wish,” said Phil shyly, after a pause, “that you’d let me thank you—for this whole business.”
“For God’s sake, don’t!” Stacey exclaimed sharply. “Thank me if I give you anything real—peace or—or freedom. Don’t thank me for anything to do with money!”