"Higher rents mean more business, my novices in the Art of Getting Rich!" said Miss Bradbury keeping on her unruffled way. "This block is my judgment for you; we will talk it over afterwards. If the rent is not forth-coming at first, you understand that I am responsible for it. If the tea room really amounts to anything it will be likely to pay more than rent here. Elsewhere, I doubt it would get beyond making its own lower rent. Do you see that house with the square bow window, like a shop, but close curtained with green sash curtains? That is Mrs. Stewart's dancing school, and she is anxious to sub-let the shop on the lower floor. She will give it to you at a reasonable figure, and it has the great advantage of being under the rooms which she uses, where you can have the benefit of the dear little woman's advice and chaperonage. I have known Mrs. Stewart for a long time, admiring her and pitying her with all my heart. Here we are!"
A curtained door led down three steps into the shop, but Miss Bradbury rang the house bell and a maid admitted her, with the four girls in her train, into the hall and into a reception-room at its rear.
A little lady with a charming face, who moved with the rhythm of a poem, came swiftly into the room to greet the arrivals.
"Oh, I hope you'll like the little shop!" she cried girlishly, giving Margery a quick glance of admiration that instantly included handsome Gretta and Happie, with her irregular, attractive face. "It never was used as a shop. I am its first tenant and I used it for dancing classes until I decided that the children were better kept altogether on the first floor—this would be a basement shop, you know, if the house were quite normal."
"Then you are not dismayed by the apparition of such youthful tenants?" suggested Miss Keren. "Margery, this girl, will keep her eighteenth birthday sooner than she would if she realized the penalties of being grown up. Happie, my unfortunate namesake, is fifteen, Laura is thirteen—but she is not a responsible person, only an assistant in the project, as is Gretta, this Pennsylvania girl of ours who has turned out the real owner of my farm—I mean the farm that I thought I owned. Then, little Madam Terpsichore, will you let us see the room?"
"Yes, indeed," agreed Mrs. Stewart, leading the way. She opened the door upon a large room, bare of all furniture except a piano, and a few chairs neatly piled one upon another as if they had been arrested in playing leap frog.
The woodwork of the room was white, panelled in green; there was about it great cheerfulness and suggestions of all sorts of possibilities. The girls looked at one another with bright, excited eyes.
"You like it," Miss Keren stated, not needing to ask.
"We love it, Aunt Keren—if we can afford to," said Happie whimsically.