“Those perplexities are annoying. I’d assumed that you’d given the thing up.”
“Well, I thought I had! But I’m determined now to go on. There’s a piece of land I can get that’s just the thing. That neighborhood is so isolated—the people have no amusements unless they come to town. I’d like to go ahead so they can have some use of the house this winter.”
Bruce nodded his sympathy with the idea.
“Now since I talked with you I’ve found some pictures of such houses. I’ve got ’em here.” He drew from his pocket some pages torn from magazines. “I think we might spend a little more money than I thought at first would be available. We might go thirty thousand to get about what’s in this house I’ve marked with a pencil.”
Bruce scrutinized the pictures and glanced over the explanatory text.
“The idea seems to be well worked out. There are many such clubhouses scattered over the country. You’d want the reading room and the play room for children and all those features?”
“Yes; and I like the idea of a comfortable sitting-room where the women can gather and do their sewing and that sort of thing. And I’d like you to do this for me—begin getting up the plans right away.”
Shepherd’s tone was eager; his eyes were bright with excitement.
“But, Mr. Mills, I can hardly do that! I’m really only a subordinate in Mr. Freeman’s office. It would be hardly square for me to take the commission—at least not without his consent.”
Shepherd, who had not thought of this, frowned in his perplexity. Since his talk with Constance he had been anxious to get the work started before his father heard of it; and he had been hoping to run into Bruce somewhere to avoid visiting Freeman’s office. He felt that if he had an architect who sympathized with the idea everything would be simplified. His father and Freeman met frequently, and Freeman, blunt and direct, was not a man who would connive at the construction of a building, in which presumably Franklin Mills was interested, without Mills’s knowledge.