They studied it carefully from the carriage, and Hart pointed out all the little triumphs of design. It was, as Helen felt, much more genuine than the Phillips house. It was no bungling copy, but an honest answer to a modern problem--an answer, to be sure, in the only language that the architect knew. Helen wanted to see the interior, although Jackson displayed no enthusiasm over that part of the structure. And in the inside came the disaster! The evidences of the contractor's false, flimsy building darkened the architect's brow. "The scamp!" he muttered, emerging from the basement. "He's propped the whole business on a dozen or so 'two-by-fours.' And I guess he's put in the rottenest plumbing underground that I ever saw. I don't believe it ever had an inspection." "Show me what you mean," Helen demanded. He pointed out to her some of the devices used to skimp the building. "Even the men at work here know it. You can see it by the way they look at me. Why, the thing is a paper box!" In some of the apartments the rough work was scarcely completed, in others the plasterers were at work; but the story was the same everywhere. "I can't see how he escaped the Building Department. He's violated the ordinances again and again. But I suppose he knows how to keep the inspectors quiet." He remembered the Canostota: he had no manner of doubt, now, about those I-beams in the Canostota. "Francis!" Helen exclaimed with sudden passion; "you won't stand it? You won't let him do this kind of thing?" The architect shrugged his shoulders. "It's his building. He bought the plans and paid for them." She was silent, troubled in her mind by this business distinction, but convinced that wrong was being done. A thing like this, a fraud upon the public, should be prevented in some way. "Can't you tell him that you will report him to the Building Department?" she asked finally. Hart smiled at her impetuous unpractically. "That would hardly do, would it, to go back on a client like that? It's none of my business, really. Only one hates to feel that his ideas are wasted on such stuff as this is made of. The city should look after it. And it's no worse than most of these flat buildings. Look at that one across the street. It's the same cheap thing. I was in there the other day.... No, it's the condition of things in this city,--the worst place for good building in the country. Every one says so. But God help the poor devils who come to live here, if a fire once gets started in this plaster-and-lath shell!" He turned to the entrance and kicked open the door in disgust. Helen's face was pale and set, as if she could not dismiss the matter thus lightly. "I never thought of fire!" she murmured. "Francis, if anything like that should happen! To think that you had drawn the plans!"