I asked him in. He was eager to know who designed the shop. I told him that the different city attics I had worked in were responsible. He found this interesting. Finally I told him about the dream that I hoped some time to come true out yonder among the baby elms--the old father fireplace and all its young relations, the broad porches and the nine stone piers, the bedrooms strung on a balcony under a roof of glass, the brick-paved _patio_ below and the fountain in the centre.... As he was a very good listener, I took another breath and finished the picture--to the sleeping porch that would overhang the bluff, casement-windows, red tiles that would dip down over the stone-work, even to the bins for potatoes and apples in the basement.
"That's very good," he said. "I'm an architect of Chicago. I believe I can frame it up for you."
When a thing happens like that, I invariably draw the suspicion that it was intended to be so. Anyway, I had to have plans.... When they came from Chicago, I shoved the date of building ahead to Nineteen-Thirty, and turned with a sigh to the typewriter.... Several days afterward there was a tap at the study door in the drowsiest part of the afternoon. A contractor and his friend, the lumberman, were interested to know if I contemplated building. Very positively I said not--so positively that the subject was changed. The next day I met the contractor, who said he was sorry to hear of my decision, since the lumberman had come with the idea of financing the stone house, but was a bit delicate about it, the way I spoke.
This was information of the most obtruding sort.... One of my well-trusted friends once said to me, looking up from a work-bench in his own cellar:
"When I started to build I went in debt just as far as they would let me."
He had one of the prettiest places I ever saw--of a poor man's kind, and spent all the best hours of his life making it lovelier.
He smiled. "No--not by a good deal less than half."
"But suppose something should happen that you couldn't finish paying for it?"
"Well, then I've had a mighty good time doing it for the other fellow."
So I went down the shore with the lumberman, and we sat on the sand under a pine tree.... On the way home I arranged for excavation and the foundation masonry.... I'm not going to tell you how to build a house, because I don't know. I doubt if ever a house was built with a completer sense of detachment on the part of the nominal owner--at times.... When they consulted me, I referred to the dream which the architect had pinned to matter in the form of many blue-prints--for a time.