“You really like it? I’m so glad! But you’ve neglected me, scandalously. You promised to come some time and learn to dance.” Rather unsteadily, “Oh, but you didn’t mean it seriously!” “Perhaps not. But you might have tried!” “Well, here I’ve come for my lesson, and you might just as well prepare to have me stay for supper!” They both laughed in a manner which indicated that of course he didn’t mean it. “But first I guess I better look at that leak.” She climbed with him to the flat roof of the apartment-house--a detached world of slatted wooden walks, clotheslines, water-tank in a penthouse. He poked at things with his toe, and sought to impress her by being learned about copper gutters, the desirability of passing plumbing pipes through a lead collar and sleeve and flashing them with copper, and the advantages of cedar over boiler-iron for roof-tanks. “You have to know so much, in real estate!” she admired. He promised that the roof should be repaired within two days. “Do you mind my ’phoning from your apartment?” he asked. “Heavens, no!” He stood a moment at the coping, looking over a land of hard little bungalows with abnormally large porches, and new apartment-houses, small, but brave with variegated brick walls and terra-cotta trimmings. Beyond them was a hill with a gouge of yellow clay like a vast wound. Behind every apartment-house, beside each dwelling, were small garages. It was a world of good little people, comfortable, industrious, credulous. In the autumnal light the flat newness was mellowed, and the air was a sun-tinted pool. “Golly, it’s one fine afternoon. You get a great view here, right up Tanner’s Hill,” said Babbitt. “Yes, isn’t it nice and open.” “So darn few people appreciate a View.” “Don’t you go raising my rent on that account! Oh, that was naughty of me! I was just teasing. Seriously though, there are so few who respond--who react to Views. I mean--they haven’t any feeling of poetry and beauty.” “That’s a fact, they haven’t,” he breathed, admiring her slenderness and the absorbed, airy way in which she looked toward the hill, chin lifted, lips smiling. “Well, guess I’d better telephone the plumbers, so they’ll get on the job first thing in the morning.” When he had telephoned, making it conspicuously authoritative and gruff and masculine, he looked doubtful, and sighed, “S’pose I’d better be--” “Oh, you must have that cup of tea first!” “Well, it would go pretty good, at that.”