You talk just like a civic improvement society, she said, laughing.
We did have a chap lecturing on that down at the club a few nights ago, he admitted, and maybe I have picked up a bit of the talk. But wouldnt it be a good thing, anyhow?
Oh, I quite approve of it, now that I see your plan, she agreed; but could it be made to pay?
Well, he returned with a grave assumption of that businesslike air he had recently been trying to copy down at the Traders Club, there are one hundred and twenty acres in the tract. I can buy it for two hundred dollars an acre, and sell each acre, in building lots, for full six hundred. It seems to me that this is enough margin to carry out the needed improvements and make the marketing of it worth while. What do you think of it?
They both gazed out over that desolate expanse and tried to picture it dotted with comfortable cottages, set down in grassy lawns that bordered on white, clean streets, and the idea of the transformation was an attractive one.
It looks to me like a perfectly splendid idea, Agnes admitted. I wonder what your father would have thought of it.
Well, confessed Bobby a trifle reluctantly, this very proposition was presented to him several times, I believe, but he always declined to go into it.
Then, decided Agnes, so quickly and emphatically that it startled him, dont touch it!
Oh, but you see, he reminded her, the governor couldnt go into everything that was offered him, and to this plan he never urged any objection but that he had too many irons in the fire.
I wouldnt touch it, declared Agnes, and that was her final word in the matter, despite all his arguments. If John Burnit had declined to go into it, no matter for what reason, the plan was not worth considering.
CHAPTER VIII BOBBY SUCCEEDS IN SNAPPING A BARGAIN FROM UNDER SILAS TRIMMERS NOSE
Just the chap, declared Nick. Stan Rogers has written me that Im to scrape the regular crowd together and come up to his new Canadian lodge for a hunt. Stag affair, you know. Real sport and no pink-coat pretense.
Sorry, Nick, said Bobby, pluming himself a trifle upon his steadfastness to duty, but I know what Stans stag affairs are like. It would mean two weeks at least, and I could not spare that much time from the city.
Business again! groaned Payne in mock dismay. This grasping greed for gain is blighting the most promising young men of our avaricious country. Why, its positively shameful, Bobby, when your father must have left you over three million.
Two hundred and fifty thousand, so far as Im allowed to inquire just now, corrected Bobby; and Im ordered to go into business with that and prove that Im not such a blithering idiot that I cant be trusted with the rest of it, whatever there is.
But I thought youd had your trial by fire and pulled out of it, interposed Nick. I heard that you had sold your interests or something, and when I saw a new sign over the store I knew that it was true. Sensible thing, I call it.
Sensible! winced Bobby. Youre allowing me a mighty pleasant way out of it, but the fact of the matter is that I lost in such a stinging way Im bound to get back into the game and do nothing else until I win, and he explained how Silas Trimmer had performed upon him a neat and delicate operation in commercial surgery.
They were properly sympathetic; not that they cared much about business, but if Bobby had entered any game whatsoever in which he had been soundly beaten, they could quite understand his desire to stay in that game until he could show points on the right side.
Nevertheless, Nick urged, you ought to take a little breathing spell in between.
All through lunch, and through the game of billiards which followed, they strove to make him see the error of his ways, but Bobby was obdurate, and at last they gave him up as a bad job, with the grave prediction that later he would find
himself nothing more nor less than a beast of burden. When he left them Bobby was surprised at himself. For a time he had feared that in his declaration of such close attention to business he might be posing; but he found that to miss a stag hunting party, which heretofore had been one of his keenest delights, weighed upon him not at all; found actually that he would far rather stay in the city to engage in the game of finance which was unfolding before him! He came upon this surprising discovery while he was on his way across to a side street, where, on the fourth floor of a store and warehouse building, he let himself in at a wide door with a latch-key and entered the gymnasium of Biff Bates. That gentleman, in trunks, sweater and sandals, was padding all alone around and around the edge of the hall at a steady jog, which, after twenty solid minutes, had left no effect whatever upon his respiration.
Getting fat as a butcher again, he announced as he trotted steadily around to Bobby, suddenly stopping short with an expansive grin across his wide face and a handshake that it took an athlete to withstand. Got to cut it down or itll put me on the blink. Whats the best thing you know, chum?