"Why, that's just as easy," she said. "A home is merely a home.
It includes a front porch and a back porch and a fireplace and a bathtub and an ice chest and a view and a garden around it; all the rest is incidental. If you have more money, you have more incidentals. If you don't have so much, you use your imagination and think you have just as much on less.""Now, I wonder," said Peter, "when I find my dream lady, if she will have an elastic imagination.""Haven't you found her yet?" asked Linda casually.
"No," said Peter, "I haven't found her, and unfortunately she hasn't found me. I have had a strenuous time getting my start in life. It's mostly a rush from one point of interest to another, dropping at any wayside station for refreshment and the use of a writing table. Occasionally I have seen a vision that I have wanted to follow, but I never have had time. So far, the lady of this house is even more of a dream than the house.""Oh, well, don't worry," said Linda comfortingly. "The world is full of the nicest girls. When you get ready for a gracious lady I'll find you one that will have an India-rubber imagination and a great big loving heart and Indian-hemp apron strings so that half a dozen babies can swing from them."Morrison turned to Henry Anderson.
"You hear, Henry?" he said. "I'm destined to have a large family. You must curtail your plans for the workroom and make that big room back of it into a nursery.""Well, what I am going to do," said Henry Anderson, "is to build a place suitable for your needs. If any dream woman comes to it, she will have to fit herself to her environment."Linda frowned.
"Now, that isn't a bit nice of you," she said, "and I don't believe Peter will pay the slightest attention to you. He'll let me make you build a lovely room for the love of his heart, and a great big bright nursery on the sunny side for his small people.""I never believed," said Henry Anderson, "in counting your chickens before they are hatched. There are a couple of acres around Peter's house, and he can build an addition as his needs increase.""Messy idea," said Linda promptly. "Thing to do, when you build a house, is to build it the way you want it for the remainder of your life, so you don't have to tear up the scenery every few years, dragging in lumber for expansion. And I'll tell you another thing. If the homemakers of this country don't get the idea into their heads pretty soon that they are not going to be able to hold their own with the rest of the world, with no children, or one child in the family, there's a sad day of reckoning coming. With the records at the patent office open to the world, you can't claim that the brain of the white man is not constructive. You can look at our records and compare them with those of countries ages and ages older than we are, which never discovered the beauties of a Dover egg-beater or a washing machine or a churn or a railroad or a steamboat or a bridge. We are head and shoulders above other nations in invention, and just as fast as possible, we are falling behind in the birth rate.
The red man and the yellow man and the brown man and the black man can look at our egg-beaters and washing machines and bridges and big guns, and go home and copy them; and use them while rearing even bigger families than they have now. If every home in Lilac Valley had at least six sturdy boys and girls growing up in it with the proper love of country and the proper realization of the white man's right to supremacy, and if all the world now occupied by white men could make an equal record, where would be the talk of the yellow peril? There wouldn't be any yellow peril. You see what I mean?"Linda lifted her frank eyes to Peter Morrison.
"Yes, young woman," said Peter gravely, "I see what you mean, but this is the first time I ever heard a high-school kid propound such ideas. Where did you get them?""Got them in Multiflores Canyon from my father to start with,"said Linda, "but recently I have been thinking, because there is a boy in high school who is making a great fight for a better scholarship record than a Jap in his class. I brood over it every spare minute, day or night, and when I say my prayers Iimplore high Heaven to send him an idea or to send me one that Ican pass on to him, that will help him to beat that Jap.""I see," said Peter Morrison. "We'll have to take time to talk this over. It's barely possible I might be able to suggest something.""You let that kid fight his own battles," said Henry Anderson roughly. "He's no proper bug-catcher. I feel it in my bones."For the first time, Linda's joy laugh rang over Peter Morrison's possession.
"I don't know about that," she said gaily. "He's a wide-awake specimen; he has led his class for four years when the Jap didn't get ahead of him. But, all foolishness aside, take my word for it, Peter, you'll be sorry if you don't build this house big enough for your dream lady and for all the little dreams that may spring from her heart.""Nightmares, you mean," said Henry Anderson. "I can't imagine a bunch of kids muddying up this spring and breaking the bushes and using slingshots on the birds.""Yes," said Linda with scathing sarcasm, "and wouldn't our government be tickled to death to have a clear spring and a perfect bush and a singing bird, if it needed six men to go over the top to handle a regiment of Japanese!"Then Peter Morrison laughed.
"Well, your estimate is too low, Linda," he said in his nicest drawling tone of voice. "Believe me, one U. S. kid will never march in a whole regiment of Japanese. They won't lay down their guns and walk to surrender as bunches of Germans did. Nobody need ever think that. They are as good fighters as they are imitators. There's nothing for you to do, Henry, but to take to heart what Miss Linda has said. Plan the house with a suite for a dream lady, and a dining room, a sleeping porch and a nursery big enough for the six children allotted to me.""You're not really in earnest?" asked Henry Anderson in doubting astonishment.
"I am in the deepest kind of earnest," said Peter Morrison.
