an inheritance. . . ."
"Oh, money. There's no worry there. We're rich." He grinned at Smoky. "Rich as Croesus." He leaned back, clutching one flannel knee in his oddly small hands. "My grandfather's, mostly. He was an architect. And then my own, from the stories. And we've had good advice." He looked at Smoky in a strange, almost pitying way. "That you can always count on having—good advice." Then, as if he had delivered a piece of it himself, he unfolded his legs, slapped his knees, and got up. "Well. Time I was going. I'll see you at dinner? Good. Don't wear yourself out. You've got a long day tomorrow." He spoke this last out the door, so eager was he to go.
The Architecture of Country Houses
He had noticed them, behind glass doors up behind where Doctor Drinkwater had sat on the chesterfield; he got up now on his knees on the sofa, turned the convolute key in its lock, and slid open the door. There they were, six together, Just as the guidebook had said, neatly graduated in thickness. Around them, leaning together or stacked up horizontally, were others, other printings perhaps He took out the slimmest one, an inch or so thick. Arc hitecture of Country Houses. Intaglie cover, with that "rustic" Victorian lettering (running biaswise) that sprouts twigs and leaves. The olive color of dead foliage. He riffled the heavy leaves. The Perpendicular, Full or Modified. The Italianate Villa, suitable for a residence on an open field or campagna. The Tudor and the Modified Neo-classical, here chastely on separate pages. The Cottage. The Manor. Each in its etched circumstances of poplars or pines, fountain or mountain, with little black visitors come to call, or were they the proud owners come to take possession? He thought that if all the plates were on glass, he could hold them all up at once to the mote-inhabited bar of sunlight from the window and Edgewood would appear whole. He read a bit of the text, which gave careful dimensions, optional fancies, full and funny accounting of costs (ten-dollar-a-week stonemasons long dead and their skills and secrets buried too) and, oddly, what sort of house suited what sort of personality and calling. He returned it.
The next one he drew out was nearly twice as thick. Fourth edition, it said, Little, Brown, Boston 1898. It had a frontispiece, a sad, soft pencil portrait of Drinkwater. Smoky vaguely recognized the artist's hyphenated double name. Its chock-full title page had an epigraph: I arise, and unbuild it again. Shelley. The plates were the same, though there were a set of Combinations that were all floorplans and labeled in a way Smoky couldn't comprehend.
The sixth and last edition, great and heavy, was beautifully bound in art-nouveau mauve; the letters of the title stretched out shuddered limbs and curling descenders as though to grow; the whole seemed as though reflected in a rippled lily-pond surface all in bloom at evening. The frontispiece was not Drinkwater now but his wife, a photograph like a drawing, smudged like charcoal. Her indistinct features. Perhaps it wasn't the art. Perhaps she was as he had been, not always fully present; but she was lovely. There were dedicatory poems and epistles and a great armor of Prefaces, Forewords and Prolegomena, red type and black; and then the little houses again just as before, looking now old-fashioned and awkward, like an ordinary small town swept up in a modern mania. As though Violet's amanuensis were struggling for some last grasp of reason over the pages and pages studded with capitalized abstractions (the type had grown smaller as books had grown thicker), there were marginal glosses every page or so, and epigraphs, chapter headings, and all paraphernalia that makes a text into an object, logical, articulated, unreadable. Tipped in at the end against the watered endpapers was a chart or map, folded over several times, a thick packet in fact. It was of thin paper, and Smoky at first couldn't see how to go about unfolding it; he began one way, winced at the little cry it made as an old fold tore slightly, began again. As he glimpsed parts of it, he could see it was an immense plan, but of what? At last he had the whole unfolded; it lay crackling across his lap face down, he had only to turn it face up. He stopped then, not sure he wanted to see what it was. I suppose, the Doctor had