"You're not talking about our going to live out there!" Max's tone
was derisive.

"Why not?"

"Have you seen the place lately?"

"Not since I was a little girl, but I remember I thought it was
lovely then."

"It isn't lovely now, if it ever was--which I doubt. In the first place
it belongs to that little suburb of Wybury--as commonplace a village as
ever existed within five miles of as big a city as this. In the second
place it's as much an abandoned farm as neglect can make a place that was
once, I suppose, an aristocratic sort of country home. The old mansion is
as big as a barn, and as hopeless. You couldn't any more make a home out
of it!--Why, you could put this whole apartment into the room at the left
of the hall!"

"How do you know so much about it?" demanded Sally. "None of us has been
there since Aunt Alicia died--that was when we were children, and Uncle
Maxwell used to spend his summers there."

"He hasn't spent them there since she died," Max asserted. "How do I know
so much about it? I was down there last summer with Frank Sustis. His
father sent him out to look the place over, with a view to buying it
himself for a summer home. You should have heard Prank jeer at the idea
while we were going about."