“Yes; it would be a big thing for you,” Freeman added. “You’d better drop your work in the office and concentrate on it....”
Undeterred by the cold, Bruce drove daily into the country, left his car and walked—walked with a new energy begotten of definite ambition and faith in his power of achievement. To create beautiful things: this had been his mother’s prayer for him. He would do this for her; he would create a thing of beauty that should look down forever upon the earth that held her dust.
The site of the proposed building was on the crest of a hill on the outskirts of Laconia and within sight of its main street. Bruce had known the spot all his life and had no trouble in visualizing its pictorial possibilities. The forest trees that crowned the hill would afford a picturesque background for an open colonnade that he meant to incorporate in his plans.
Walking on clear, cold nights he fancied that he saw on every hilltop the structure as it would be, with the winds playing through its arches and wistful young moons coming through countless years to bless it anew with the hope and courage of youth.
II
On Shep’s account rather than because of any interest he felt in Constance, Bruce had twice looked in at the Shepherd Mills’s on Constance’s day at home.
Constance made much of the informality of her “days,” but they were, Bruce thought, rather dull. The girls and the young matrons he met there gave Mrs. Shep the adoration her nature demanded; the few men who dropped in were either her admirers or they went in the hope of meeting other young women in whom they were interested. On the first of these occasions Bruce had found Leila and Fred Thomas there, and both times George Whitford was prominent in the picture.
Thomas was not without his attractions. His cherubic countenance and the infantile expression of his large myopic blue eyes made him appear younger than his years. The men around the University Club said he had a shrewd head for business; the women of the younger set pronounced him very droll, a likely rival of Bud Henderson for humor. It was easy to understand why he was called Freddy; he had the look of a Freddy. And Bruce thought it quite natural that Leila Mills should fancy him.
Constance’s attempts to attract the artistic and intellectual on her Thursdays had been a melancholy failure; such persons were much too busy, and it had occurred to the musicians, literary aspirants and struggling artists in town that there was something a little patronizing in her overtures. Her house was too big; it was not half so agreeable as the Freemans’, and of course Freeman was an artist himself and Dale was intelligently sympathetic with everyone who had an idea to offer. As Bud Henderson put it, Dale could mix money and social position with art and nobody thought of its being a mixture, whereas at Constance’s you were always conscious of being either a sheep or a goat. Connie’s upholstery was too expensive, Bud thought, and her sandwiches were too elaborate for the plebeian palates of goats inured to hot ham in a bun in one-arm lunch rooms.
Gossip, like death, loves a shining mark, and Mrs. Shepherd Mills was too conspicuous to escape the attention of the manufacturers and purveyors of rumor and scandal. The parochial habit of mind dies hard in towns that leap to cityhood, and the delights of the old time cosy gossip over the back fence are not lightly relinquished. Bruce was appalled by the malicious stories he heard about people he was beginning to know and like. He had heard George Whitford’s name mentioned frequently in connection with Connie’s, but he thought little of it. He had, nevertheless, given due weight to Helen Torrence’s warning to beware of becoming one of Connie’s victims.