"It's chilly, now that the sun's gone," said Charlotte. "Shall we row in? This mantle is very light."
It cannot be said that he flushed then, but a little flood of dark color came into his pallid face. He rowed for the boat-house. He maneuvered the boat alongside the landing. Twilight had come on. The shed-like place was too dim for safety, lighted at the far end with one cobwebby lantern. He hallooed to the absent boatman, shipped his oars, and stepped out none too expertly. Charlotte stood up, smiling. She was glad to be in. Sitting opposite him thus, in the boat, it had been impossible to evade his red-rimmed eyes. Still smiling a little, with relief she took his proffered hand as he stood on the landing, stepped up, stumbled a little because he had pulled with unexpected (and unnecessary) strength, and was horrified suddenly to see him thrust his head forward like a particularly nasty species of bird, and press moist clammy lips to the hollow of her throat. Her reaction was as unfortunate as it was unstudied. "Uriah Heep!" she cried (at last! the resemblance that had been haunting her all these days), "Heep! Heep!" and pushed him violently from her. The sacred memories of the past twelve years, violated now, were behind that outraged push. It sent him reeling over the edge of the platform, clutching at a post that was not there, and into the shallow water on the other side. The boatmen, running tardily toward them, fished him out and restored him to a curiously unagitated young lady. He was wet but uninjured. Thus dripping he still insisted on accompanying her home. She had not murmured so much as, "I'm sorry." They walked home in hurried silence, his boots squashing at every step. The Thrifts—father, mother, and daughter—still were seated on the platform before the house, probably discussing real estate values—two of them, at least. Followed exclamations, explanations, sympathy, flurry.
"I fell in. A bad landing place. No light. A wretched hole."
Charlotte turned abruptly and walked up the front steps and into the house. "She's upset," said Mrs. Thrift, automatically voicing the proper thing, flustered though she was. "Usually it's Charlotte that falls into things. You must get that coat off at once. And the.... Isaac, your pepper-and-salt suit. A little large but.... Come in.... Dear, dear!... I'll have a hot toddy ready.... Carrie...."
It was soon after the second Chicago fire that Isaac Thrift and his son-in-law built the three-story-and-basement house on Prairie avenue, near 29th Street. The old man recalled the boast made almost forty years before, that some day he would build as far south as Thirtieth Street; though it was not, as he had then predicted, a country home.
"I was a little wrong there," he admitted, "but only because I was too conservative. They laughed at me. Well, you can't deny the truth of it now. It'll be as good a hundred years from now as it is to-day. Only the finest houses because of the cost of the ground. No chance of business ever coming up this way. From Sixteenth to Thirtieth it's a residential paradise. Yes sir! A res-i-den-tial paradise!"
A good thing that he did not live the twenty-five years, or less, that transformed the paradise into a smoke-blackened and disreputable inferno, with dusky faces, surmounted by chemically unkinked though woolly heads, peering from every decayed mansion and tumble-down rooming house. Sixteenth Street became a sore that would not heal—scrofulous, filthy. Thirty-first Street was the centre of the Black Belt. Of all that region Prairie Avenue alone resisted wave after wave of the black flood that engulfed the streets south, east, and west. There, in Isaac Thrift's day, lived much of Chicago's aristocracy; millionaire if mercantile; plutocratic though porcine. And there its great stone and brick mansions with their mushroom-topped conservatories, their porte-cochères, their high wrought-iron fences, and their careful lawns still defied the years, though ruin, dirt, and decay waited just outside to destroy them. The window-hangings of any street are its character index. The lace and silk draperies before the windows of these old mansions still were immaculate, though the Illinois Central trains, as they screeched derisively by, spat huge mouthsful of smoke and cinders into their very faces.
Isaac Thrift had fallen far behind his neighbours in the race for wealth. They had started as he had, with only courage, ambition, and foresight as capital. But they—merchants, pork-packers—had dealt in food and clothing on an increasingly greater scale, while Isaac Thrift had early given up his store to devote all his time to real estate. There had been his mistake. Bread and pork, hardware and clothing—these were fundamental needs, changing little with the years. Millions came to the man who, starting as a purveyor of these, stayed with them. At best, real estate was a gamble. And Isaac Thrift lost.
His own occasional short-sightedness was not to blame for his most devastating loss, however. This was dealt him, cruelly and criminally, by his business partner and son-in-law, the plausible Payson.