"You know, man," the architect replied, wincing at the frank speech, "how I am fixed with Graves. I don't like this business any better than you do, but we'll be through with it before long; and I shan't get into it again, I can tell you."
He growled in his turn to the contractor, who received his protest with contemptuous good humor.
"You'd better take a look at what other men are doing, if you think I am making the Graveland such an awful cheap building. I tell you, there ain't money in the other kind. Why, I worked for a man once who put up a first-class flat building, slow-burning construction, heavy woodwork, and all that. It's old-fashioned by this—and its rents are way down. And I saw by the paper the other day that it was sold at the sheriff's sale for not more than what my bill came to! What have you got to say to that?"
Therefore the architect dismissed the Graveland from his mind as much as he could, and saw little of it while it was under construction, for the contractor did his own superintending. One day, however, he had occasion to go to the building, and took his wife with him. They drove down the vast waste of Grand Boulevard; after passing through that wilderness of painful fancies, the lines of the Graveland made a very pleasant impression.
Hart had induced Graves to sacrifice part of his precious land to an interior court, around which he had thrown his building like a miniature château, thus shutting out the sandy lots, the ragged street, which looked like a jaw with teeth knocked out at irregular intervals. A heavy wall joined the two wings on the street side, and through the iron gates the Park could be seen, just across the street.
"Lovely!" Helen exclaimed. "I'm so glad you did it! I like it so—so much more than the Phillips house."
They studied it carefully from the carriage, and Hart pointed out all the little triumphs of design. It was, as Helen felt, much more genuine than the Phillips house. It was no bungling copy, but an honest answer to a modern problem—an answer, to be sure, in the only language that the architect knew.
Helen wanted to see the interior, although Jackson displayed no enthusiasm over that part of the structure. And in the inside came the disaster! The evidences of the contractor's false, flimsy building darkened the architect's brow.
"The scamp!" he muttered, emerging from the basement. "He's propped the whole business on a dozen or so 'two-by-fours.' And I guess he's put in the rottenest plumbing underground that I ever saw. I don't believe it ever had an inspection."
"Show me what you mean," Helen demanded.