“Your father is a most estimable man, but I fear he makes a grave mistake in not telling you about things,” declared Wallingford. “I believe in the value of a woman’s intuition, and if I were as closely related to you as your father I am sure I should confide all my prospects to you.”
Miss Fannie gave a little inward gasp. That serious tide in the talk, fraught with great possibilities, for which every girl longs and which every girl dreads, was already setting ashore.
“You might get fooled,” she said. “Father don’t think any woman has very much gumption, and least of all me, since—since he married again.”
“I understand,” said Wallingford gently, and drove on. “Just to show you how much differently I look at things from your father, I’m going to tell you all about the black pottery project and see what you think of it.”
Thereupon he explained to her in minute detail, a wealth of which came to him on the spur of the moment, the exact workings of the Etruscan pottery art. He painted for her, in the gray of stone and the yellow of face brick and the red of tiling, the beautiful studio buildings that were to be erected yonder facing the swamp; he showed her through cozy, cheerfully lighted apartments in those studios, where the best trained artists of Europe, under the direction of the wizard, Vittoreo Matteo, should execute ravishments of Etruscan black pottery; he showed her, as the bays pranced on, connoisseurs and collectors coming from all over the country to visit the Blakeville studios, and carrying away priceless gems of the ceramic art at incalculable prices!
The girl drank in all these details with thirsty avidity.
“It’s splendid! Perfectly grand!” she assured him with vast enthusiasm, and in her memory was stored every precious word that this genius had said; and they were stored in logical order, ready to reproduce on the slightest provocation, which was precisely the result which Wallingford had intended to produce.
It was nearing noon now, and making a détour by the railway road they drove up in front of the mill with the spanking bays just as Jonas Bubble was coming out of his office to go to dinner. Hilariously they invited him into the carriage, and in state drove him home.
Wallingford very wisely kept away from the Bubble home that afternoon and that evening, and by the next morning every woman in town had told all her men-folk about the vast Etruscan black pottery project!