king Socialism," I said crossly, wondering whether Lucia had
taken it up as her latest fad.

"Oh, no, I'm not," said Maude, "I don't know what Socialism is. I'm
talking about something that anyone who is not dazzled by all this luxury
we are living in might be able to see, about something which, when it
comes, we shan't be able to help."

I ridiculed this. The prophecy itself did not disturb me half as much as
the fact that she had made it, as this new evidence that she was
beginning to think for herself, and along lines so different from my own
development.

While it lasted, before novelists, playwrights, professors and ministers
of the Gospel abandoned their proper sphere to destroy it, that Golden
Age was heaven; the New Jerusalem--in which we had ceased to
believe--would have been in the nature of an anticlimax to any of our
archangels of finance who might have attained it. The streets of our own
city turned out to be gold; gold likewise the acres of unused, scrubby
land on our outskirts, as the incident of the Riverside Franchise--which
I am about to relate--amply proved.

That scheme originated in the alert mind of Mr. Frederick Grierson, and
in spite of the fact that it has since become notorious in the eyes of a
virtue-stricken public, it was entered into with all innocence at the
time: most of the men who were present at the "magnate's" table at the
Boyne Club the day Mr. Grierson broached it will vouch for this. He
casually asked Mr. Dickinson if he had ever noticed a tract lying on the
river about two miles beyond the Heights, opposite what used to be in the
old days a road house.

"This city is growing so fast, Leonard," said Grierson, lighting a
special cigar the Club kept for him, "that it might pay a few of us to
get together and buy that tract, have the city put in streets and sewers
and sell it in building lots. I think I can get most of it at less than
three hundred dollars an acre."

Mr. Dickinson was interested. So were Mr. Ogilvy and Ralph Hambleton, and
Mr. Scherer, who chanced to be there. Anything Fred Grierson had to say
on the question of real estate was always interesting. He went on to
describe the tract, its size and location.

"That's all very well, Fred," Dickinson objected presently, "but how are
your prospective householders going to get out there?"

"Just what I was coming to," cried Grierson, triumphantly, "we'll get a
franchise, and build a street-railroad out Maplewood Avenu