He improvised an ornate and airy edifice of his own,
which he allowed them to dedicate to art, to education, to charity, to
what you will. Then he festooned it with telegraph wires, and draped it
with fire-escapes, and girdled it with a stretch of elevated road, and
hung it with signboards, and hedged it in with fruit-stands, and swathed
it in clouds of coal smoke, and then asked them to find it; that was the
puzzle, he said. His view of the town's architectural conditions--as too
debased to justify one's serious endeavors towards improvement--was so
nearly in harmony with the view that his father's inflamed mind sometimes
took of the town's social conditions that the two were dangerously near
to the common ground upon which they had never yet met.
Bingham would have completely dissented from all this, of course; and he
agreed with Marshall no better as regarded the precarious condition of
his affairs--being disposed to assume that the old man's depression over
his business was due largely to the multiplied checks on his own control
of it; nor any better as regarded his unusual domestic expenses--present,
just past, or just about to come. He was mindful of the house-building,
but looked upon it, with Roger, as an investment. He knew of the
thousands extorted through Truesdale, but made the loss less than might
have resulted from a maladroit barter in real estate, for example. He
could anticipate, too, the demands foreshadowed by the coming marriage of
Rosamund; but a considerable expenditure for a favorite daughter at the
most important juncture of her life was not unprecedented.
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