"That's only because of that affair you told me of," said my wife. "Since I've seen her, I've made up my mind that you misconstrued the matter utterly. There was really nothing to it."
In a week I wrote to Mr. Elkins, accepting his proposal, and promising to close up my affairs, remove to Lattimore, and join with him.
"I do not feel myself equal to playing the part of either Romulus or Remus in founding your new Rome," I wrote; "but I think as a writer of fire-insurance policies, and keeping the office work up, I may prove myself not entirely a deadhead. My wife asks how the breathing-spaces for the populace are coming on?"
Had I known how cordially our neighbors would greet our return, or how many of them would view our departure with apparently sincere regret, I might have been slower in giving Jim my promise. I proceeded, however, to carry it out; but it was nearly six months before I could pull myself and my little fortune out of the place into which we had grown.
Mr. Elkins kept me well informed regarding Lattimore affairs; and the _Herald_ followed me home. Jim's letters were long typewritten communications, dictated at speed, and mailed, sometimes one a day, at other times at intervals of weeks.
"This is a sure-enough 'winter of our discontent,'" one of these letters runs, "but the scope of our operations will widen as the frost comes out of the ground. We're now confined to the psychical field. Subjectively speaking, though, the plot thickens. Captain Tolliver is in the secondary stages of real-estate dementia, and spreads the contagion daily. There's no quarantine regulation to cover the case, and Lattimore seems doomed to the acme of prosperity. This is the age of great cities, saith the Captain, and that Lattimore is not already a town of 150,000 people is one of the strangest, one of the most inexplicable things in the world, in view of the distance we are lag of the country about us, so far as development is concerned. And as our beginning has been tardy, so will our progress be rapid, even as waters long dammed up rush out to devour the plains, etc., etc.
"In this we are all agreed. We want a good, steady, natural growth--and no boom.
"When a boom recognizes itself as such, it's all over, and the stuff off. The time for letting go of a great wheel is when it starts down hill. But our wheels are all going up--even if they are all in our heads, as yet.