"Straight lines," said V.V., modestly. But he regarded his handiwork with passionate approbation, and finished it off gallantly with a flag flying from the roof and two stately motor-trucks (so he said) wheeling by the door.
"Oh, how beautiful!" cried Cally Heth.
And it was all so curiously exciting to her, so intensely interesting. No prospect in her life, it seemed, had ever stirred her like this strange one; a new cigar-factory, born of her purse and heart....
Once, about at this point, the young man threw out with mysterious delight:
"I'll like to see old Sam O'Neill's face, when he hears about this."
In the midst of the animated talk came Annie, the parlormaid--and Cally started at the sound of the approaching feet, and hated herself for it--to say that Dr. Vivian was wanted at the telephone. The doctor seemed annoyed by the summons, though not surprised; he had had to take the liberty, he explained as he rose, of leaving word at his office where he could be found, in case of necessity--words of this sort being left, as we know, with his paid assistant, Mrs. Garland, the world's biggest office-boy.
So V. Vivian was led away by Annie to the downstairs telephone in the butler's pantry; whence he was back in a moment, looking relieved, and assuring Miss Heth that it was nothing in the least urgent or important. There was no hurry at all, it seemed. But Cally felt that the business talk was drawing to a close, with a good deal still left unsaid....
Returning with eager interest to his drawing, Mr. V.V. fell to planting shade-trees of the best quality all down the Seventeenth Street side of the new building. So engaged, he observed suddenly:
"Don't worry any more about those floors, please--will you? That's all going to work out very nicely.... I'll get a figure from Jem Noonan right away on that plan of yours. And I'll see that it's a low figure, too,--it's got to be low!... Good heavens!" said V.V., eyeing his drawing with a queer little introspective smile. "We can't be expected to spend anything much on a building that's going to come down in a couple of months, you know."
She looked, smiling a little, too, at his unconscious face, fine, to thinness, which had once made Mr. Pond think of a bishop who never grew up. And her look became suddenly full of tenderness....