The Pleasant Street Partnership | Page 2

are pretty much alike.
It happened that the druggist had for a brother a young and aspiring architect, who conceived the idea of putting up a building in keeping with a residence district. The result was a sloping-roofed structure whose shingled second story projected over the first, which was of concrete. It might have been a rural station, or post-office, or a seaside cottage, but a drug store it did not remotely suggest.
The store opened on Pleasant Street; to reach the private entrance you must go in from the Terrace, where there was a square of lawn and a maple tree, relic of better days.
The worst of it was its utter incongruousness, the best--so Alexina Russell said--that it invariably made you smile, and anything in this weary world that caused a smile was not wholly bad. Miss Sarah Leigh pretended to admire it, and declared she wanted to meet the architect. Of all things she liked originality. Mrs. Millard heard her disdainfully. Any departure from tradition was objectionable in her eyes, and she was deficient in a sense of humor. Judge Russell complained that now St. Mark's had taken to high-church customs, and the Terrace was degenerating, it was time for him to be put away in Spring Hill Cemetery.
Pretty Madelaine, his granddaughter, looked longingly toward Dean Avenue, being divided between a desire for its new splendors and a complacent consciousness that it was something of a distinction in these days to live in the house where your father was born. Alexina, her sister, treated this with scorn. She loved the shabby old house for other reasons.
In spite of the original intentions of the builder, fate decreed that this much-talked-of place was not to be a drug store after all, and early in the summer, before it was finished, it was advertised for rent.
The plastering stage was beginning when the agent in charge one day appeared conducting a young woman over the premises. If the agent's manner revealed some slight curiosity concerning her, it was not to be wondered at, for it was more than probable he had never before seen so charming a person in the guise of a possible shopkeeper.
Her bearing was dignified and businesslike, and if a smile hovered about her lips as they explored the odd little house, it did not go beyond the bounds of a polite interest. At length she seated herself on an empty nail keg in the shop, and became absorbed in thought. The agent leaned against the door frame and waited.
"I shall want a few changes made if I lease it," she announced suddenly, after some minutes of silence.
The agent started as her eyes met his. "Oh, certainly," he replied, as if ready to agree without hearing what they were. On second thought he added that the architect was at that moment coming up the street, and the best plan, perhaps, would be to submit her wishes to him.
To this she graciously assented, and he left her. When he was gone, the young woman's dignity relaxed. She smiled broadly; she even laughed. "How ever did it happen!" she exclaimed.
She produced a tape-line and made measurements, then she stood with the tip of her tongue touching her upper lip. "I do wish Marion could see it," she said. "She will never believe what a fascinatingly funny place it is."
She was surveying the neighborhood from the front door when the agent returned, accompanied by the architect.
She wanted very little, she announced reassuringly; a fireplace in the shop was the chief thing.
The agent suggested that it would be far more expensive to heat the room with an open grate than with an anthracite base burner. Whereupon she explained that an open fire was part of her stock in trade, and it would be impossible to carry on her line of business without one.
The agent ventured to inquire what her line was, and she answered with a twinkle in her eye, "Notions."
The architect was doubtful about the fireplace, but not unwilling to discuss it, and they grew so friendly over the matter that the agent retired to the door and stared gloomily up the street.
From the fireplace the discussion turned to other things. As a possible tenant, the young lady consulted the architect about the best color for the walls, so adroitly insinuating her own ideas as to the proper stain for the woodwork that they seemed his own.
While they talked, a small boy in a gingham apron, with a sailor hat on the back of his curly head and a gray flannel donkey under his arm, wandered in and stood surveying them with great composure.
"Who's going to live here?" he presently asked, his brown eyes upon the lady.
She met his gaze with a smile that drew him a step nearer, but caused no break in