For years the house at 93 Sloan Street had displayed a sign announcing
that it was “to let or for sale,” and these words might as well have
been followed by “take it or leave it,” for that was the owner’s
attitude.
It was a hopeless house, dark, damp, and badly arranged, standing in a
garden where enormous old trees cast so dense a shade over the front
lawn that not even grass would thrive. As for the back garden, only the
queerest, most obstinate, ancient shrubs were there, huddled against the
side fence, because anything less tenacious was inevitably carried away
by the river in its annual spring flood.
Just now the river was low, dolloping along dejectedly between its brown
and uninteresting banks. Everything was brown--the water, the bare
trees, the fields, the road in front, and No. 93 itself. Altogether the
breath of life had gone out of Sloan Street, and to any one coming down
from the sunny, breezy hilltop it seemed a sorry spectacle.
Some one had come down from the hilltop this morning--a brisk, neat
little red-haired lady. She came smartly along the road to No. 93,
pushed open the gate, and walked up the garden path. She saw the portly,
white-haired lady standing on the veranda, looking down the road.
“Good morning!” said the visitor. “I’m your neighbor, Mrs. Aldrich.”
She waited at the foot of the steps, because she thought she would not
go up on the veranda until she was invited. Well, she never was invited.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” she asked, with honest and
neighborly good will.
The portly lady looked down at her as if doubtful whether such a
creature could really exist.
“Thank you, there is not,” she said.
Mrs. Aldrich was greatly taken aback.
“I thought perhaps--” she began, in a tone not quite so neighborly, but
the other interrupted.
“Very good of you, I’m sure; but I shall do very well, thank you.”
That last “thank you” seemed capable of lifting Mrs. Aldrich out of the
garden all by itself.
“I wouldn’t set foot in that place again,” she declared, “if she begged
me on her knees!”
This declaration was addressed to her nephew, Jerry Sargent. She had
made it before, to her husband and to a neighbor or so, but she found
special pleasure in telling things to Jerry, for the strange reason that
he never agreed with her. She was a shrewd, sensible, rather peppery
little woman. She had been his guardian when he was younger, and she
still interfered pretty considerably in his affairs--which he
good-humoredly permitted.
“If you could have seen the way she looked at me!” she went on. “As if I
were a--a toad!”
“I know,” replied Jerry. “I didn’t see her, but I heard her, and I know
the sort of look that would go with that tone. ‘Who is that impossible
person?’ She told me she didn’t encourage chance acquaintances, and it
looks as if she meant it!”
“I should have made her get out of that taxi and walk--in the rain!”
cried Mrs. Aldrich, who had been informed of the episode of the previous
night.
“Of course you would,” her nephew agreed, with a grin. “I know you! And
you’d have called her names out of the window as you passed her,
wouldn’t you? But I’m much milder. I was ashamed of being a chance
acquaintance, anyhow. It didn’t seem respectable.”
“I wish you wouldn’t take everything so lightly!” complained Mrs.
Aldrich, but she didn’t mean it. The thing she loved best in her nephew
was his careless and generous good humor, his utter lack of malice or
resentment. “You ought to have more pride, Gerald, than to allow
yourself to be trampled on.”
He rose to his feet, and stood looking down at her with an expression of
great severity; and though his aunt knew it to be assumed, she thought
it very becoming to his face. A big, handsome fellow he was, with the
gray eyes and black hair and all the wit and charm and grace of his
blessed mother, and all the energy and practical good sense of his
father. A good man of business he was, but into the dullest matter of
routine, into the most trifling details of everyday life, he brought his
own sort of laughing romance.
“Very well, madam!” said he. “You’re disappointed in me because I’ve let
myself be trampled on. Now you’ll see what I can do when my pride is
roused!”
“Jerry, you ridiculous boy! Where are you going?”
“Down to No. 93,” said he. “The turning worm! Good-by!”
And off he went, down the hill, whistling as he walked.