Walworth at once adjusted matters with Atwater. The architect received his "reconsideration" with composure, but he was doubtless nettled to be balked in a work in which he had taken unusual personal interest, and he was also disappointed merely to be paid for his plans when he had looked for the fees that follow construction. These considerations may have had their influence on the account which he rendered a month later to the Ogdens—friends and relatives of the Floyds, and introduced, too, by them. This account was handed in much more promptly than is generally the case with an accredited client in other professions—the legal or the medical, let us say—and its final footing caused Ogden considerable consternation.
The account was mailed to the house instead of to the bank, and the stationery employed was such as to suggest a personal matter between gentlemen rather than a purely business matter between architect and client; and Ogden opened it under his wife's eyes to learn that design had cost him more than construction.
"Your drawings are more of an item than your porch itself," he said, rather faintly. "I shall have to step up there and see about it."
[XIX]
Late one afternoon Ogden drew down his desk-top, put on his street-coat, felt in his pocket to be sure that Atwater's tasteful memorandum was still there, and took the elevator up to the eighteenth floor. He had been as conscious of that memorandum all through the day as he would have been of a mustard-plaster. On taking it out and recreasing its immaculate folds he almost felt as if he were about to dispute a debt of honor.
Atwater was in, but he was completely taken up in radiating his careful affability upon some promising clients who wanted not only doors but the house that went with them. Ogden got no closer to him than to secure the attention of the clerk whose duty it was to mediate between the contractors and the plans they were to follow.
He was an alert, nervous young man, with a big shock of unruly hair and a pair of large, luminous eyes behind his hooked and shimmering spectacles. He ran his long, lean, inky fingers through his hair, and transferred his wide eyes from the memorandum to the man who had brought it in.
"No," he said presently; "it's all right—there's no mistake. Mr. Atwater took a good deal of interest in this work. He sketched out some of the drawings himself, to start with, and he even touched up a few of them to finish with."
"Touched up a few of them to finish with?" George repeated, inquiringly.