“The property that it was suggested I buy.”
“No wonder your father thought it necessary to appoint a trustee,” was her first comment. “Why, Bobby, what on earth could you do with it? It’s too large for a frog farm and too small for a summer resort,” and once more she turned incredulous eyes upon the “property.”
Dark, oily water covered the entire expanse, and through it emerged, here and there, clumps of dank vegetation, from the nature and dispersement of which one could judge that the water varied from one to three feet in depth. Higher ground surrounded it on all sides, and the urgent needs of suburban growth had scattered a few small, cheap cottages, here and there, upon the hills.
“It doesn’t seem very attractive until you consider those houses,” Bobby confessed. “You must remember that the city hasn’t room to grow, and must take note that it is trying to spread in this direction. Wouldn’t a fellow be doing a rather public-spirited thing, and one in which he might take quite a bit of satisfaction, if he drained that swamp, filled it, laid out streets and turned the whole stretch into a cluster of homes in place of a breeding-place for fevers?”
“You talk just like a civic improvement society,” she said, laughing.
“We did have a chap lecturing on that down at the club a few nights ago,” he admitted, “and maybe I have picked up a bit of the talk. But wouldn’t it be a good thing, anyhow?”
“Oh, I quite approve of it, now that I see your plan,” she agreed; “but could it be made to pay?”
“Well,” he returned with a grave assumption of that businesslike air he had recently been trying to copy down at the Traders’ Club, “there are one hundred and twenty acres in the tract. I can buy it for two hundred dollars an acre, and sell each acre, in building lots, for full six hundred. It seems to me that this is enough margin to carry out the needed improvements and make the marketing of it worth while. What do you think of it?”
They both gazed out over that desolate expanse and tried to picture it dotted with comfortable cottages, set down in grassy lawns that bordered on white, clean streets, and the idea of the transformation was an attractive one.
“It looks to me like a perfectly splendid idea,” Agnes admitted. “I wonder what your father would have thought of it.”