Two years passed and they were still living in the Loring place, which the architect had remodelled comfortably to suit his modern taste. Occasionally he talked of building, and they looked at land here and there. But it was clearly out of the question at present, for each year the family budget went leaping upward, and the income came tagging after.
"Jack," so Everett Wheeler expressed the situation in the raw phrase of the ordinary man, "Jack\'s got a champagne appetite. But he\'s a pretty good provider."
The architect was a good provider: he enjoyed heartily the luxury that his money brought him, and he wanted his wife to enjoy it with him. He worked at high pressure and needed his bread and meat well seasoned with excitement. Once, early in their married life, Mrs. Phillips had volunteered to explain to Helen the philosophy of this masculine temperament.
"Some men need more food than others. They\'d mope and grow thin if they dined at home on a chop and went to bed at ten every night. They must have something to make steam. Your young man was born to be a spender."
The second winter the Phillipses had gone to Europe, where the widow was still adding to her collection for the new house,—Forest Manor as she had dubbed it. Leaving Venetia in Paris with some friends, she had descended upon Italy, the rage for buying in her soul. There she gathered up the flotsam of the dealers,—marbles, furniture, stuffs,—a gold service in Naples, a vast bed in Milan, battered pictures in Florence. Mrs. Phillips was not a discriminating amateur; she troubled her soul little over the authenticity of her spoil. To San Giorgio, Simonetti, Richetti, and their brethren in the craft she came like a rich harvest, and they put up many a prayer for her return another season.
In March of that year, Jackson Hart, struggling with building strikes in Chicago, had a cablegram from the widow. "Am buying wonderful marbles in Florence. Can you come over?" The architect laughed as he handed the message to his wife, saying lightly, "Some one ought to head her off, or she\'ll be sending over a shipload of fakes." Helen, mindful of the widow\'s utterances about Jackson, and thinking that he needed the vacation after two years of hard work, urged him generously to accept the invitation and get a few weeks in Italy. But there was no time just then for vacation: he was in the grip of business, and another child was coming to them.
From time to time Mrs. Phillips\'s purchases arrived at Forest Park and were stored in the great hall of her house. Then late in the spring the widow telephoned the architect.
"Yes, I am back," came her brisk, metallic tones from the receiver. "Glad to be home, of course, with all the dirt and the rest of it. How are you getting on? I hear you are doing lots of things. Maida Rainbow told me over there in Paris that you were building the Bushfields an immense house. I am so glad for you—I hope you are coining money."
"Not quite that," he laughed back.
"I want you to see all the treasures I have bought. I\'ve ruined myself and the children! However, you\'ll think it\'s worth it, I\'m sure. You must tell me what to do with them. Come over Sunday, can\'t you? How is Mrs. Hart? Bring her over, too, of course."
Thus she gathered him up on her return with that dexterous turn of the wrist which exasperated her righteous brother-in-law. On the Sunday Jackson went to see the "treasures," but without Helen, who made an excuse of her mother\'s weekly visit. He found the widow in the stable, directing the efforts of two men servants in unpacking some cases.
"Ah, it\'s you! How are you?"
She extended a strong, flexible hand to Hart, and with the other motioned toward a marble that was slowly emerging from the packing straw.
"Old copy of a Venus, the Syracuse one. It will be great in the hall, won\'t it?"
"It\'s ripping!" he exclaimed warmly. "But where did you get that picture?"
"You don\'t like it?"
"Looks to be pure fake."
"And Simonetti swore he knew the very room where it\'s hung for over a hundred years."
"Oh, he probably put it there himself!"
"Come into the house and see the other things. I have some splendid chairs."
For an hour they examined the articles she had bought, and the architect was sufficiently approving to satisfy Mrs. Phillips. Neither one had a pure, reticent taste. Both were of the modern barbarian type that admires hungrily and ravishes greedily from the treasure house of the Old World what it can get, what is left to get, piling the spoil helter-skelter into an up-to-date American house. Medi?val, Renaissance, Italian, French, Flemish—it was all one! Between them they would turn Forest Manor into one of those bizarre, corrupt, baroque museums that our lavish plunderers love,—electric-lighted and telephoned, with gilded marble fireplaces, massive bronze candelabra, Persian rugs, Gothic choir stalls, French bronzes—a house of barbarian spoil!
A servant brought in a tray of liquors and cigarettes; they sat in the midst of pictures and stuffs, and sipped and smoked.
"Now," Mrs. Phillips announced briskly, "I want to hear all about you!"
"It\'s only the old story,—more jobs and more strikes,—the chase for the nimble dollar," he answered lightly. "You have to run faster for it all the time."
"But you are making money?" she questioned directly.
"I\'m spending it."
He found it not difficult to tell her the state of his case. She nodded comprehendingly, while he let her see that his situation, after two years of hard work, was not altogether as prosperous as it appeared on the surface. Payments on buildings under construction were delayed on account of the strikes; office expenses crept upward; and personal expenses mounted too. And there was that constant pressure in business—the fear of a cessation in orders.
"We may have to move back to town after all. That Loring place is pretty large to swing, and in town you can be poor in obscurity."
"Nonsense! You must not go back. People will know then that you haven\'t money. You are going to get bigger things to do when the strikes are over. And you are so young. My! not thirty-five."
Her sharp eyes examined the man frankly, sympathetically, approving him swiftly. His clay was like hers; he would succeed, she judged—in the end.
"Come! I have an idea. Why shouldn\'t you build here, on my land? Something pretty and artistic; it would help you, of course, to have your own house. I know the very spot, just the other side of the ravine—in the hickories. Do you remember it?"
In her enthusiasm she proposed to go at once to examine the site. Pinning a big hat on her head, she gathered up her long skirt, and they set forth, following a neat wood-path that led from the north terrace into the ravine, across a little brook, and up the other bank.
"Now, here!" She pointed to a patch of hazel bushes. "See the lake over there. And my house is almost hidden. You would be quite by yourselves."
He hinted that to build even on this charming spot a certain amount of capital would be needed. She frowned and settled herself on the stump of a tree.
"Why don\'t you try that Harris man? You know him. He made a heap of money for me once,—corn, I think. He knew just what was going to happen. He\'s awfully smart, and he\'s gone in with Rainbow, you know. I am sure he could make some money for you."
"Or lose it?"
She laughed scornfully at the idea of losing.
"Of course you have got to risk something. I wouldn\'t give a penny for a man who wouldn\'t trust his luck. You take my advice and see Harris. Tell him I sent you."
She laughed again, with the conviction of a successful gambler; it became her to laugh, for it softened the lines of her mouth.
She was now forty-one years old, and she appeared to Jackson to be younger than when he had first gone to see her after his uncle\'s death. She had come back from Europe thinner than she had been for several years. Her hair was perfectly black, still undulled by age, and her features had not begun to sharpen noticeably. She had another ten years of active, selfish woman\'s life before her, and she knew it. Meantime he had grown older rapidly, so that they were much nearer together. She treated him quite as her equal in experience, and that flattered him.
"Yes," she continued, in love with her project, "there isn\'t a nicer spot all along the shore. And you would be next door, so to say. You could pay for the land when you got ready, of course."
She gave him her arm to help her in descending the steep bank of the ravine, and she leaned heavily on him. Beneath the bluff the lake lapped at the sandy shore in a summer drowse, and the June sun lay warmly about the big house as they returned to it. The shrubbery had grown rankly around the terrace, doing its best in its summer verdancy to soften the naked walls. The architect looked at the house he had built with renewed pride. It was pretentious and ambitious, mixed in motive like this woman, like himself. He would have fitted into the place like a glove, if his uncle had done the right thing. Somewhat the same thought was in the widow\'s mind.
"It was............