“No, dearie, no! Your speed is just going to be my speed unless it is too much for me, and we’ll both get up to the top of the hill together.”
“Kiss me then, Phil,––and let us turn for home. I am happy at last,––just ever so happy.”
“Eileen, I think I’d better come along and make my peace, et cetera, et cetera, with your dad,” said Phil, as they neared Vernock again. “Does he know anything of our plans?”
“No, Phil! I have told him of our good friendship, but I have been waiting and waiting in the hope that a chance would come for us to talk to him when he was not absorbed, body, soul and spirit, in business and politics. But the time seems to get farther and farther off than ever. I guess you had better come along now.
“And don’t I wish you could advise him to give up his silly notions for acquiring land. He might listen to you, Phil. You might be able to induce him to sell part of what he has in order to bolster up what remains. If a slump of any kind comes, he will be without a prop to lean on. No man has any right to involve himself in this way, no matter how good the ultimate prospects may look.”
“I can’t understand it, Eileen, for it appears to be a kind of contagious disease, attacking the ablest and otherwise most business-like men in the Province. Your father is by no means alone.”
“I know; Mr. Brenchfield, Mr. Arbuthnot, the Victoria and the Vancouver political gang,––they are all more or less in it the same way. I can’t think what has 351 come over them. The danger signals ahead stand out so brightly to me, although I may be wrong. I hope,––oh, I hope I am!
“They have got to think so much prosperity and progress that they have hypnotised themselves into believing that it is permanent. And they all imagine, whatever comes, that they will be able to see before the man in the street does and so be able to get out from under, leaving someone else with the load of unrealisable property.”
“I am afraid, though, your dad would hardly listen to me. He would put any advice I might give him down to gratuitous impertinence and cubbish presumption.”
Eileen sighed again.