He was as innocent as I was, and he was good enough to see me off on the train at Vevey. He is a man I would like to have you meet, I think you would find in him all the nice, jolly, companionable, witty things you find in Ross Ireland and at the same time a subtlety and good taste that I’m sure you will admit with all his fine qualities Mr. Ireland lacks. Well, perhaps we will run into Arnold when you come back for I believe he is taking a whole year this time wandering around Europe.
Oh, do come soon, darling! I miss you so today! If you were here we’d take the little batello—aren’t you proud of me, I’ve already learned ten words of Italian in one day; “Come in” is avanti and the bill is le conto or no, il conto I think it is—and we’d go scooting around the lake. If it’s convenient you might send another couple of thousand, Guaranty Paris—of course I have to pay my share of the rent at the cursed villa at Vevey even though I’m not there. I suppose if I didn’t, and I certainly would jolly well like not to, the De Pénable woman would go around saying that I was not only a libertine and a man-snatcher but also an embezzler!
How I’d like to have you spank her for me with your big beautiful strong hand! You’d do it so calmly and so thoroughly! So of course I have to pay my share of the rent and limousine hire there and as I also have to pay now for my rooms here or wherever I may be (you better not depend on this address reaching me but address ℅ Guaranty) it will make things a little more expensive than I had hoped. Oh, dear, I did hope this would be a nice economical summer, and heaven knows I tried hard enough to make it so, but I didn’t expect the unexpected to unexpect quite so disastrously. I feel better now after talking to you like this—I cried almost all last night—and I shall now live the life of a nun and devote myself to the study of the Italian language and people, as befits an old lady like me.
That letter had come on the day when the president of the Sans Souci Gardens Company had invited Sam to lunch.
He was very frank, the president. He was a trained architect. He astonished Sam by admitting that he thought Sans Souci rather dreadful.
“There’s too much mixture of styles, and the houses are too close together,” he said. “But most Americans, while they’ll pay a devil of a lot for a big impressive house, don’t care enough for privacy so that they’ll pay for a decent-sized plot of ground. And they want French châteaux in a Henry Ford section! But at least we’ve been educating them to be willing to come out toward the country instead of huddling together in the city. And I’m planning now, if Sans Souci doesn’t ruin me, a much bigger development where we won’t mix the styles. Oh, I suppose we’ll have to go on cribbing from Europe and Colonial America. When a natural genius comes along and creates something absolutely new in houses, only a few people really like ’em. But I picture a new development—I hope with a less agonizing name than Sans Souci Gardens, which is the invention of that grand old Frenchman, one of my partners, Mr. Abe Blumenthal—in which, at least, we can keep the thing from looking like a world’s fair. For instance, one section strictly confined to houses more or less in the Tudor style, and another all Dutch Colonial, or something not warring with Dutch Colonial. Or maybe the whole development in one style. Like Forest Hills on Long Island.”
But—the Sans Souci president went on—he himself was too fanciful and too impatient. And as partner he needed someone (he hinted that it might be Sam) who would take the hundred or so notions for hotels and luxurious yachting tours and chain restaurants which he conceived every month, pick out the most practical, and control the financing, the selling.
He grinned. “Doesn’t sound like much of an offer. It’s based on the belief that I do have some new and interesting ideas along with quite a decent knowledge of architecture and building. But—I’d like to see if it isn’t possible for us to get together. While you’d been deciding that you were bored with selling cars and while you’ve been looking up my record for dependability—”
“Oh, you guessed that?” grunted Sam.
“Of course!”
“I’ll think it over, I most certainly will,” said Sam.
He returned to the country club, planning a dozen or so new kinds of real estate developments of his own, to receive Fran’s distressed letter from Stresa.
It all seemed to fit in. He would bring her back; together they would look into the building of houses. He cabled her, “Too bad penable glad got rid her why don’t you return zenith then abroad again in year or so.
”
She answered, “No want stay few more months suit self about joining.
”
And the great Samuel Dodsworth still had no more notion of what he was going to do than when, as a senior in college, he had sat on East Rock, looking at Long Island Sound, planning to be a bridge-builder in the Andes.
He wrote to her of the Sans Souci Gardens, and waited. He read about domestic architecture, and went to Cleveland and Detroit to inspect new developments.
Her next letter had been written some days before he had received her Stresa letter, before she had his cable. It informed him:
Yes, my
