Page:Stanwood Pier--The ancient grudge.djvu/198

Rh Later that day he went over the items on the bill and reluctantly verified them; it had not occurred to him that as from time to time he had thought of some new feature to make a workingman's house attractive he was making it so very expensive. His lack of practical knowledge and experience had led him badly astray. He had expected to overrun the estimate by a small amount—so small that Farrell could easily pay it. "I guess I won't get caught that way again," he muttered, as he drew a check for fifty-eight hundred and sixty-five dollars. After doing this he made out a bill to Hugh Farrell for three thousand dollars, and sent it with a note explaining that the mistake had been satisfactorily adjusted.

From the occurrence Stewart derived several lessons, the most important to him personally being these,—that to build dignified houses for the laboring classes is not remunerative business, and that an architect wishing to do really beautiful and artistic work had better confine himself to clients able to pay a good deal larger price than any they had considered in their first calculations. Yet he was not to escape the embarrassments of his indiscretion. Hugh and Letty could not refrain from telling a few of their friends what they had paid for their delightful house; there were a number of men in New Some who could put three thousand dollars into a house, and several of these men, friends like Joe Shelton, and unfriendly, jealous rivals like Tustin, bought land back on the hill, not far from Hugh, and then went to Stewart Lee. They were hurt or indignant and certainly mystified when he declined to undertake their commissions. "I have so much work to do now," was his excuse, "I simply cannot give my time to this. I am devoting myself, anyway, to an entirely different kind of thing." They understood that he meant to larger matters, and they felt snubbed. One of them, Tustin, expressed himself as willing to have a house built on just the same plans as Farrell's. "That would n't cost you any work," Tustin said. "It would