When RoBards saw Patty drop down in front of Chalender and hold his hand, he had an impulse to shoot the dog dead. But he could not stain Tuliptree Farm with blood. While he waited for the stableman to take the horses, he could see that Chalender’s manner with Patty was intimate, emotional, intense. He was probably bewailing his loss of her. RoBards felt that the innocent old house was depraved by such insolence, but in order to deny his wife the luxury of another festival of his jealousy, when he came up on the porch he greeted Chalender as cordially as he could, and complimented him on his appearance—which was altogether too hale to please RoBards. Harry Chalender usually suited his talk to his company, and the gallant became at once the man of affairs. “That’s the Bronx down there, isn’t it, Dave? We ought to have it in New York now. It would put an end to this cholera. That’s one reason why I’m up here in this solitude. New York is dying of thirst; we’ve got to have water; we’ve put it off too long. But nobody can decide what to do. The conservative crowd says the well water that was good enough for our fathers is good enough for us. But our fathers died in great agony, and we’re doing the same. The New York water is good enough for cholera and yellow fever. It’s a fine thing, too, for Greenwich Village, and other far-off points that the whole town runs away to every few summers. But New York has got to get good water and plenty of it—or move out of New York. “Funny, isn’t it, how people hate to be saved? I was reading that when Pontius Pilate brought water into Jerusalem, the Jews rose in a mob and demanded somebody’s life—as they did on a certain other famous occasion. And no doubt it will be devilish hard—pardon me, Patty!—to persuade the New York mob to take water—and pay for it. “You could divide the town into two parties, the Drys and the Wets. And we Wets are at war among ourselves. One party wants to get a supply from the Passaic River; some favor our Croton; some lean toward your Bronx.” RoBards answered with dubious irony: “I’d thank them to lean the other way. If New York lays hands on our classic stream, I’ll rise in a mob myself.” Chalender offered an argument he probably supposed to be irresistible: “You could sell out your holdings at a vast profit, and get very rich without a stroke of work. I’m casting about for a few quiet investments. If I only knew which way the cat would jump, I could do very handsomely by myself.” RoBards answered coldly: “Different people have different standards of honesty.” Patty gasped at the directness of this stab, but Chalender laughed: “And some people call that honesty which is really only an indifference to opportunity. Most of these starving farmers up here would shout with joy if I offered them twenty-five dollars an acre. If I sold it later for a hundred, they would howl that I had cheated them. But think how much more gracefully I should spend it.”