"But why be an innkeeper?" asked Herring. "Why not set up as a landscape-gardener?"
"I don't know enough. But I've often thought——"
"I've got five hundred acres outside of Boston that I'd like to turn you loose on."
"You speak as if I were a goat."
"The first thing to do is to drain the swamps. Now, I'll make you a proposition. I can't put it in writing, because it's too dark to see and I have no writing materials, but there is nothing fishy about us Herrings. You to landscape my place for me, cause a suitable house to be built, and so forth; I to pay you a thousand dollars a month, and a five per cent commission on the total expenditure."
"And what might that amount to?"
"What you please," said Herring politely.
"Who says Bostonians are cold?" exclaimed Phyllis. And there began to float through her head lovely visions of landscapes of her own making.
"You're still joking, aren't you?" she said after a while.
"I don't know landscapes well enough to joke about them," he said.