“Why,” said Julius, “shouldn’t we buy one of those new houses in Sunset
Terrace? They look very attractive, and if we can only induce two
or three congenial couples to join forces with us we shall have the
nucleus of a delightful colony.”
“Besides, everything will be nice and new,” said Mrs. Julius, or Dolly
Cæsar, as her friends know her. “No cockroaches, no mice, no moths, no
family skeletons to torment us. Julius, you are a genius. We can just
as well set the fashion as follow meekly in fashion’s wake.”
So said, so done. Julius Cæsar bent his intellect upon the matter and
soon found three congenial couples who were willing to join forces with
him. Before another twelve months had passed, four baby-wagons--one of
them double-seated--were to be seen on four sunny grass-plots in front
of four attractive, artistic-looking villas on Sunset Terrace. Where
lately sterility, mortar, and weeds had held carnival, there was now an
air of tasteful gentility. Thanks to the example of Dolly Cæsar, who
had an eye and an instinct for such matters, the four brass door-plates
shone like the sun, the paint was spick and span, the four gravel
paths were in apple-pie order, the four grass-plots were emerald from
timely use of a revolving lawn sprinkler, and the four nurse-maids, who
watched like dragons over the four baby-wagons, were neat-looking and
comely. No wonder that by the end of the second year there was not a
vacant house in the street, and that everybody who wished to live in
a fashionable locality was eager for a chance to enter Sunset Terrace.
No wonder, too, that Mr. and Mrs. Julius Cæsar were able, by the end
of the fourth year, to emerge from Sunset Terrace with a profit on the
sale of their villa which made it rent free for the entire period, and
left them with a neat little surplus to boot, and to settle down with
calm minds on really fashionable Belport Avenue, in the stately mansion
devised to them by Mrs. Cæsar’s grandmother.
Now, it must be borne in mind that a Mr. and Mrs. Julius Cæsar
can sometimes do that which a Mr. and Mrs. George J. Spriggs find
difficulty in accomplishing. Spriggs, at the time of his marriage to
Miss Florence Green, the daughter of ex-Assistant Postmaster-General
Homer W. Green, conceived the happy idea of setting up his household
gods in Locust Road, which lies about as far from Belport Avenue in
one direction as Sunset Terrace in the other. Both are semi-suburban.
It also occurred to him at the outset to join forces with three or
four congenial couples, but at the last moment the engagement of one
of the couples in question was broken, and the other three decided to
live somewhere else. To have changed his mind then would have involved
the sacrifice of one hundred dollars paid to bind the bargain to the
landowner. So it seemed best to them on the whole to move in, as they
had to live somewhere.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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