“Lark?” he repeated, hazily. “Lark? You’ve got the wrong bird. It’s crow.”
“No, but Henry dear, you aren’t going to be a quitter, are you?”
“Wife of my bosom, do you realize what you’re talking about? It would cost a thousand dollars just to make the place clean. It’ll cost three or four more to make it attractive enough to get anybody inside of it. And I haven’t got the price.”
“What’s the matter with a mortgage?” demanded the Judge. “And you’ve got a car, haven’t you? You’ve got a saddle-horse. You’ve got all kinds of junk you can turn into money.”
“On a wild gamble? Why, Anna, we couldn’t stay on here with the Judge––that would be getting help I’m not allowed to have––we’d have to go live in some cheap apartment; we couldn’t even have a maid for awhile; we couldn’t entertain anybody; we couldn’t have any outside pleasures; I’d have to work 80 like a dog; you know what the crowd on the hill would say––and then I’m beaten before I start anyway. Quitter! You wouldn’t call a man a quitter if he stayed out of a hurdle race because he’d broken a leg, would you?”
“Well,” said Anna, “I’m willing to live in such a cheap apartment that the landlord calls it a flat. And you can’t get any servants these days; there aren’t any. And who cares about entertaining? And for outside pleasures, why couldn’t we go to the Orpheum?” They all laughed, but Anna was the first to stop. “I’ll work just as hard as you will, Henry. I’ll peel potatoes and wash the sink––” She glanced, ruefully, at her hands––“and if it’ll help you, I––I’d sell tickets or be an usher or play the piano. Why, Henry, it would be a circus––and we wouldn’t need any snake-charmers, either.”
“And an education,” said Judge Barklay.
“And a gold-mine for us––in just one little year. We could do it; I know we could.”
“And if the stupid fool who’s had it this last year could make money out of it,” added the Judge, “and you used any intelligence on it, you’d come out ahead. John made up his 81 figures very carefully. That’s the kind of man he was.”
Henry stared at them alternately. “But if I did fall down––”