“You see for yourself,” Harlan said. “This _was_ beautiful before ‘Ornaby the Beautiful’ insulted the landscape. But now, with all these flimsy and dreadful bungalows and the signboards screeching at the trees——”
“Yes,” she interrupted, “but he’s spared all the trees he could, even back there where the bungalows and little houses were so thick. And I noticed the people were planting shrubberies and trying to make little gardens grow. It might be really very pretty some day. And just here——”
“Oh, here,” Harlan said, “where he hasn’t touched it yet, it’s well enough, of course. But you’ll find it’s only a question of time till he spoils it, though I understand he intends this to be what he calls a ’restricted residence district.’”
The paved street ran between tall woods now; the numbered lots were broad, and the car passed a few proudly marked “Sold.” Then Martha noticed one that was several hundred feet wide, and in depth extended indefinitely into a grove of magnificent beech trees. Stone pillars gave entrance upon a partly completed driveway that disappeared round an evergreen thicket, not long planted. “What a pleasant place to live! It’s getting so smoky in town it seems to me people will have to be moving out even this far some day. Whose place is that?”
“Dan’s,” Harlan said, with his dry laugh. “At least he says he plans to build there sometime. I don’t think Lena cares about it much! I heard her speaking of it as ‘out at the end of Nowhere.’ One of the interesting things about my sister-in-law, to me, is the fact that she’s really never wanted a house of her own. She’s never once proposed such a thing in all this time, I believe, but goes on living with father and mother; and year after year passes without altering that air of hers of being only temporarily marooned in what she still calls ‘the West.’”
Martha looked serious, but said nothing, and he spoke to the chauffeur, who turned westward at the next cross street. At the end of a block it ceased to be a street and became a newly gravelled road, a transformation that interested Harlan. “Funny!” he said. “I was out this way a couple of months ago and this was a dirt road with a good deal of grass on it. Now he’s had it gravelled. It leads over to the west side of his land, where he laid out the site for his factory, years ago. I thought you might like to see that.”