We said he was quite right and that too much money was certainly the cause of gout and divorce and all the other ills to which we were heir. We spoke with as much conviction as we could, while we listened to the merry clinking in our right-hand trouser-pocket of the six dollars and eighty-odd cents which we had received that morning along with the I.O.U's in our pay-envelope.
"Look at what we eat," said our host, "and look at what we drink!"
Of course, our host was one of the lucky ones who still have some drink to look at. He could therefore afford to adopt a somewhat deprecating attitude on the subject of beverages.
Suddenly the limousine whirled off the high-road and shot along a beautiful private driveway under swaying elm-trees. We were on the farm! Wildly we gazed about for the fields of grain, the hog-lot and the cow-pasture, the big red barn, and, and all the other familiar stage-properties of our agricultural tragedy of years before. But we saw none of these things.
Instead our eye rested on well-groomed apple-orchards and cherry-groves, on clumps of pines and Japanese summer-houses, on strawberry-patches and vegetable gardens. The vegetable gardens may seem to the reader to suggest farming. But the "kitchen-garden" on a real farm is merely a frowsy patch where "table truck" is grown. This particular vegetable garden was the work of a landscape artist. Judging by the amount of toil which had been put into designing it and weeding it and picking bugs off it, every potato or carrot would cost about forty cents each.
The big car swung on a wide curve, and "round the cape of a sudden came the Lake!" Browning!—we know. We do that sort of thing now and then just to show that we are a literary editor in the half of the week that we don't spend farming with our friends among the idle rich.
There was good old Lake Ontario shimmering in the glimmering sunlight, or glimmering in the shimmering sunlight—it works either way. And there was the thirty-thousand-dollar farmhouse nestling in the midst of ten acres of lawn. There, too, was the farmer's wife on the steps to welcome us—she was clad in a simple little importation from the Rue de la Paix. It was a lovely rural scene.
"Well, and what do you think of the farm?" asked our host.
Farm! Good Lord! Our thoughts leaped back to the real farms we had known, and in a broken voice we tried to tell him that this was the sort of farm we had dreamed of but never worked on. This was farming as it should be—farming de luxe.
We began farm-life that very afternoon on the grounds of the adjacent golf-club, where we planted several balls in various parts of the landscape and couldn't find them again. There would be a very decent little grove of rubber-plants on that course in a year or so, if they would let us play there a few times.