s practically no use in our having build the New House;
and if we DO know them and they're decent to us, we're right with the
right people. They can do the whole thing for us. Bobby Lamhorn told
Sibyl he was going to bring his mother to call on her and on mamma, but
it was weeks ago, and I notice he hasn't done it; and if Mrs. Vertrees
decides not to know us, I'm darn sure Mrs Lamhorn'll never come. That's
ONE thing Sibyl didn't manage! She SAID Bobby offered to bring his
mother--"

"You say he is a friend of Roscoe's?" Bibbs asked.

"Oh, he's a friend of the whole family," she returned, with a petulance
which she made an effort to disguise. "Roscoe and he got acquainted
somewhere, and they take him to the theater about every other night.
Sibyl has him to lunch, too, and keeps--" She broke off with an angry
little jerk of the head. "We can see the New House from the second
corner ahead. Roscoe has built straight across the street from us, you
know. Honestly, Sibyl makes me think of a snake, sometimes--the way
she pulls the wool over people's eyes! She honeys up to papa and gets
anything in the world she wants out of him, and then makes fun of him
behind his back--yes, and to his face, but HE can't see it! She got
him to give her a twelve-thousand-dollar porch for their house after it
was--"

"Good heavens!" said Bibbs, staring ahead as they reached the corner and
the car swung to the right, following a bend in the street. "Is that the
New House?"

"Yes. What do you think of it?"

"Well," he drawled, "I'm pretty sure the sanitarium's about half a size
bigger; I can't be certain till I measure."

And a moment later, as they entered the driveway, he added, seriously:
"But it's beautiful!"

CHAPTER IV

It was gray stone, with long roofs of thick green slate. An architect
who loved the milder "Gothic motives" had built what he liked: it was to
be seen at once that he had been left unhampered, and he had wrought a
picture out of his head into a noble and exultant reality. At the same
time a landscape-designer had played so good a second, with ready-made
accessories of screen, approach and vista, that already whatever look
of newness remained upon the place was to its advantage, as showing at
least one thing yet clean under the grimy sky. For, though the smoke was
thinner in this direction, and at this long distance from the heart
of the town, it was not absent, and under tutelage of wind and weather
could be ma