HE didn’t say it. But Father had been knocked breathless by an idea. He was silent all the way home. He made figures on the last leaf of his little pocket account-book. He man[oe]uvered to get Mother alone, and exultantly shot his idea at her.
They were beginning to get old; the city was almost too much for them. They would pick out some pretty, rustic spot and invest their savings in a tea-room. At five-hundred per cent. they would make enough during three months of summer to keep them the rest of the year. If they were located on Cape Cod, perhaps they could spend the winter with the Tubbses. They would have a garden; they would keep chickens, dogs, pussies, yes, a cow; they would buy land, acre by acre; they would have a farm to sustain them when they were too old for work; maybe they would open a whole chain of tea-rooms and ride about supervising them in a motor-car big as a house; they would—
“Now hold your horses, Father,” she begged, dizzily. “I never did see such a man for running on. You go on like a house afire. You ought to know more, at your time of life, than to go counting your chickens before—”
“I’m going to hatch them. Don’t they tell us in every newspaper and magazine you can lay your hand on that this is the Age of the Man with the Idea? Look here. Two slices of home-made bread, I calc’late, don’t cost more than three-fifths of a cent, I shouldn’t think, and cream cheese to smear on them about half a cent; there’s a little over a cent; and overhead—’course you wouldn’t take overhead into account, and then you go and say I ain’t practical and hatching chickens, and all, but let me tell you, Sarah Jane Appleby, I’m a business man and I’ve been trained, and I tell you as Pilkings has often said to me, it’s overhead that makes or breaks a business, that’s what it is, just like he says, yes, sir, overhead! So say we’ll allow—now let me see, ten plus ten is twenty, and one six-hundredth of twenty would be—six in two is—no, two in six is—well, anyway, to make it ab-so-lute-ly safe, we’ll allow a cent and a half for each sandwich, to cover overhead and rent and fuel, and then they sell a sandwich at fifteen cents, which is, uh, the way they figure percentage of profit—well, make it, say, seven hundred per cent.! ’Course just estimating roughly like. Now can you beat that? And tea-rooms is a safe, sound, interesting, genteel business if there ever was one. What have you got to say to that?”
Father didn’t often thus deluge her with words, but then he didn’t often have a Revolutionary Idea. She had never heard of “overhead,” and she was impressed; though in some dim confused way she rather associated “overhead” with the rafters of the tea-room. She emerged gasping from the shower, and all she could say was: “Yes: it would be very genteel. And I must say I always did like them hand-painted artistic things. But do you really think it would be safe, Father?”
“Safe? Pooh! Safe’s the bank!”
They were in for it. Of course they were going to discuss it back and forth for months, and sit up nights to make figures on the backs of laundry-bills. But they had been fated the moment Father had seen Mother and himself as delightful hosts playing with people in silk sweaters, in a general atmosphere of roses, fresh lobster, and gentility.
They explored the Cape for miles around, looking for a place where they might open a tea-room if they did decide to do so. They said good-by to the Tubbses and returned to New York, to the noisy streets and the thankless drudgery at Pilkings & Son’s.
In December they definitely made up their minds to give up the shoe business, take their few hundred dollars from the bank, and, the coming summer, open a tea-room in an old farm-house on the Cliffs at Grimsby Head, Cape Cod.
Out of saving money for the tea-room, that winter, the Applebys had as much fun as they had ever found in spending. They were comrades, partners in getting along without things as they had been partners in working to acquire little luxuries. They went to the movies only once a month—that made the movies only the more thrilling! On the morning before they were to go Father would pound softly on the pillow by Mother’s head and sing, “Wake up! It’s a fine day and we’re going to see a photoplay to-night!”