The architect went to the city by one of the earlier trains and came back very late. He had all the labor of supervising the construction of his buildings, for the work in the office did not warrant engaging a superintendent. He emerged from the city, after a day spent in running about here and there, with a kind of speechless listlessness, which the wife of a man in business soon becomes accustomed to. But the dinner in the lively dining-room of the club-house, with the chatter about sport and the gossip, the cigar afterward on the veranda overlooking the green, turfy valley golden in the afterglow of sunset, refreshed him quickly. He was always eager to accept any invitation, to go wherever they were asked, to have himself and his wife in the eyes of their little public as much as possible. His agreeable manners, his keen desire to please, his instinct for the conventional, the suitable, made him much more popular than his wife, who was considered shy, if not positively countrified. As the season progressed, Jackson was sure that they had made a wise choice of a place to settle in, and they began to look for a house for the winter.
These were the happiest months the architect had ever known. He was having the exquisite pleasure that a robust nature feels in the first successful bout with life. Then blows, even, are sweet, and the whole brutal surge of the struggle. The very step of him these days as he turned in at his club for a hurried luncheon, his air of polite haste, a quick, hearty manner of greeting the men he knew, proclaimed him as one who had taken his part in the game. The song of the great city sang in his ears all the day, with a sweeter, minor note of his love that was awaiting him.
Yet there were grave risks, anxieties, that pressed as the months passed. In spite of all the apparent prosperity which the little office enjoyed from the start, the profit for the first year was startlingly small. The commission from the Phillips house had long since been eaten; also as much of the fee from Graves as that close contractor could be induced to pay over before the building had been finished. The insatiable office was now devouring the profits from the railroad business. Such commissions as he had got in Forest Park and Shoreham were well-earned: the work was fussy, exacting, and paid very little. When Cook saw the figures, he spoke to the point: "It's just self-indulgence to build houses. We must quit it." If they were to succeed, they must do a larger business,--factories, mills, hotels,--work that could be handled on a large scale, roughly and rapidly.