“Will you help me?” he asked again at length. “I’m more anxious than I can tell you to have everything ready.”
“I shouldn’t like to fail you, Tony, since you really wish it, though I’m very sure you’ll find me a poor adviser. But you haven’t been a brother to me since the mud-pie days for nothing, and if I can help you with suggestions as to colour and style I’ll be glad to. Though I shall all the while be trying to live up to this photograph, and that will be a little hard on the five-dollar-dining-table scale.”
“You’ve only to look out that everything is in good taste,” said Anthony quietly, “and that you can’t help doing. My wife will thank you, and the new home will be sweet to her because of you. It surely will to me.”
II.—Measurements
It was on the first day of Robeson’s two-weeks’ July vacation that he came to take Juliet Marcy and her aunt, Mrs. Dingley, who had long stood to her in the place of the mother she had early lost, to see the home he had bought in a remote suburb of a great city. It was a three-hours’ journey from the Marcy country place, but he had insisted that Juliet could not furnish the house intelligently until she had studied it in detail.
So at eleven o’clock of a hot July morning Miss Marcy found herself surveying from the roadway a small, old-fashioned white house, with green blinds shading its odd, small-paned windows; a very “box of a house,” as Anthony had said, set well back from the quiet street and surrounded by untrimmed trees and overgrown shrubbery. The whole place had a neglected appearance. Even the luxuriant climbing-rose, which did its best to hide the worn white paint of the house-front, served to intensify the look of decay.
“Charming, isn’t it?” asked Robeson with the air of the delighted proprietor. “Of course everything looks gone to seed, but paint and a lawn-mower and a few other things will make another place of it. It’s good old colonial, that’s sure, and only needs a bit of fixing up to be quite correct, architecturally, small as it is.”
He led the way up the weedy path, Mrs. Dingley and Juliet exchanging amused glances behind his back. He opened the doors with a flourish and waved the ladies in. They entered with close-held skirts and noses involuntarily sniffing at the musty air. Anthony ran around opening windows and explaining the “points” of the house. When they had been over it Mrs. Dingley, warm and weary, subsided upon the door-step, while Juliet and Anthony fell to discussing the possibilities of the place.