The city was hot, tired, and flat after long weeks of summer; disheveled and overgrown with extra population also, as were most cities near any of the big training-camps, in that war year of 1918.
“The rooms ain’t much, honey,” he apologized, as the car ground its way west with jerks of stops and starts. “An’ they ain’t in a swell part of town; but they’re the best I could do, an’—an’ I got something to show you.”
The rooms were in a part of the city made up almost entirely of blocks of small frame houses, sheltering Richmond’s poorer inhabitants, who spilled out of their front doors on to the little porches and into the streets: the men in shirt sleeves, the women sometimes tidied for the afternoons, sometimes still in the depression of wrappers that had been worn through all the heat of the day.
“You see it ain’t much—pretty hot, an’ cheap out this way,” he apologized again as they got off the car and started along the street.
She looked up at him as she had looked before. “Oh, Tim!” she cried; and suddenly she laughed—a ripple of shy wild ecstasy. “Oh, Tim, honey! How could anything like that matter now?”
Looking at her, he caught the flaming happiness of her face, and laughed too. “I know, I know,” he whispered. “An’ anyhow, I have got something fine to show you,” he added.
Though the streets were for the most part lined with small wooden houses, there was an occasional more pretentious one of brick, and sometimes a larger frame dwelling. It was in one of these last, a double, three-storied house which accommodated several families and one or two single lodgers, that Mr. Bixby had found an abode for them—a sitting-room, a kitchen, and at the back a bedroom. The rooms were close and the furniture was cheap and ugly, but what did that matter? The porch outside was clothed with a cottage vine, a strip of zinnias and cosmos marched in the tiny front-yard, and at the back was another attempt at a flower bed.
“Oh, Tim! Oh, Tim!” she cried. She stood in the middle of the small domain and turned slowly about. “Oh, Tim! It’s ours!” The rooms ceased thereat to be mere rooms; with that rush of emotion her heart opened to them, they entered, and the place became her home.
But he would not let her linger there now. Depositing her bags, he urged her out again. “Come on,” he cried. “I got to show you ’fore it’s too late.”
He turned into a street running south, which after a few minutes’ walk came to an end in a small bit of parkway where were a row of benches and a stone balustrade. “There now! Look!” he cried. It was his triumph.