“Let me draw some plans for you,” urged Cathcart, one evening in June, when he had run out to see his friend. Juliet was by chance away, and Cathcart took advantage of this to call Anthony’s attention, in a politely frank fashion, to the shortcomings of his present residence. “It’s all right in its way,” he said, standing upon a corner of the lawn with Anthony, and surveying the house critically. “Mrs. Robeson certainly deserves full credit for the admirable way in which she restored the old house and added just the changes in keeping with its possibilities. I’ve always said it couldn’t have been better done, with the means you’ve told me you were able to put at her disposal. But the place is too small for you now.”
“I don’t think we feel it so,” said Anthony tentatively, strolling beside Cathcart along the edge of the lawn, his hands in his pockets, lifting friendly eyes at the little house. “Since we put in the bathroom—that small room off the upper hall, you know—and added the nursery and den, we’re very comfortable. The furnace keeps us warm as toast, and we’re soon to have the water system out here, so we won’t have to depend upon our present expedients. I’m fond of the place, and I’m confident Mrs. Robeson is devoted to it.”
“I can understand that,” agreed Cathcart. “Of course, the spot where you began life together will always have its charm for you both—in fact the sentiment of the matter may blind you to the real inadequacies of the place for a man in your position.”
“My position isn’t so stable that I want to build a marble palace on it yet,” said Anthony, a humorous twinkle in his eye. He enjoyed watching another man manœuvre for his favourable hearing of a scheme. It was an art in which he was himself accomplished; it was one of the points of his value to Henderson and Henderson.
“Everybody knows that you’re in a fair way to become head man with the Hendersons,” said Cathcart, “and everybody also knows that you might as well have struck a gold-mine. It’s superb, the way you have come into the confidence of those old conservatives.”
“That’s all well enough; but I don’t see that it entails upon me the duty of laying out all I’ve saved on a new house. I know what you fellows are—when you begin to draw plans your love of the ideal runs away with the other man’s pocketbook.”
“Not at all,” declared Cathcart. “Particularly when he’s a friend and you understand just what he can afford to do.”
“Why don’t you talk about enlarging the old house? That’s much more likely to appeal to my desires.”
The two had reached the back of the house and were close by the kitchen windows. Cathcart reached up and took hold of a sill. With a strong hand he wrenched and pounded about the window, until he succeeded in showing that it was old and uncertain.
“That’s why,” he said, dusting his hand with his handkerchief. “The house is old—fairly rotten in places. The minute you began to enlarge it in any ambitious way you’d find it would be cheaper to tear it down and begin again. But the site, Robeson—the site isn’t desirable. The place is respectable enough, but it has no future. The good building is all going south, not north, of the city. You don’t want to spend a lot of money here—you couldn’t sell out except at a loss.”