But first, before driving around, we had to see the Moonrise again. Grant drove slowly as the Moonrise Motel came into view, and I looked wistfully out the window. The sun gleamed on the white stucco, and the bright green shutters were magnets to the eye.
"Isn't it beautiful?" I asked sadly.
"Look!" Grant exclaimed. "There's the manager, out digging weeds! Let's stop once and talk to him."
Grant is of Holland Dutch ancestry, a fact which shows itself principally in his tendency to insert a "once" or a "quick" into as many of his sentences as possible. He doesn't fall back on the superfluous "yet's" and "already's" that sprinkle the speech of his relatives, but his method of expressing himself is rather quaint.
(It was in a very quaint way, in fact, that he proposed to me. "Let's get married once," he said. I was so intrigued by his way of putting it that I agreed.)
The manager of the motel took out a large, clean handkerchief and mopped his face and neck when we drove in.
"You folks bought a motel yet?" he wanted to know.
"Nope," Grant said. "We've been looking around, but we can't find anything we like as well as this."
The stocky man wiped his face again, and I noticed that under the moisture of his skin there was a yellowish pallor.
"Got to sell now," he said. "I'm sick; going to a sanitarium the minute I get this place off my hands. You can have it for sixty-three thousand, five hundred."