"There may be one or two along pretty soon, if the day holds fair; so I might as well keep myself in practice." Then he jocularly let himself loose on transportation, and part payments down, and street improvements "in," and healthful country air for young children. He was very fluent and somewhat cynical, and turned the seamy side of his trade a little too clearly to view.
He explained how the spring had been exceptionally wet in that region,—"which, after all, is low," he acknowledged,—and how his firm, by digging a few trenches in well-considered directions, had drained all its standing water to adjoining acres still lower, the property of a prospective rival. Recalling this smart trick made Johnny think better of the people who would maroon him for a succession of Sundays, and he became more genially communicative still.
"That gray streak off to the west—if you can see it—is our water drying up. Better be drying there than here. You can put a solid foot on every yard of our ground to-day. Come along with me and I'll show you your cottage—domus, a, um. Not quite right? Well, no great matter."
He pointed toward a yellow pile of two-by-fours, siding, and shingles. "Be sure you make your last payment before you find yourselves warped out of shape."
We followed. Johnny seemed much more expert and worldly-wise than either of us. We held our innocent excursion in abeyance and bowed with a certain embarrassed awe to Johnny's demonstration of his aptitude for taking the world as it was and to his light-handed, care-free way of handling so serious a matter, to most men, as the founding of a home. As we continued our jaunt, I began to feel that I now liked Johnny a little less than I could have wished.
III
At about this time Raymond and I found ourselves members of a little circle that expressed itself chiefly through choral music. It was almost a neighborhood circle, and almost a self-made circle—it gradually evolved itself, with no special guidance or intention, until, finally, there it was. I, at that period, may have felt that it would verge on the presumptuous to pick and choose—to attempt consciously the fabrication of a social environment—and so I adopted with docility the one which presented itself. Raymond, on the other hand, may have felt that even the best which was available was unlikely to be good enough and have accepted fatalistically anything which could possibly be made to do.
Just why our little group of a dozen or so should have united on a musical basis and have expressed itself in a weekly "sing" I might find it hard to explain. None of us fellows was especially blessed with a voice; and the various Gertrudes and Adeles that met with us were assuredly without any marked sanction to vocalize. Possibly the "sing" was the mere outcome of youthful exuberance and of the tendency of young and eager molecules to crystallize into what came, later, to be termed a "bunch."