Carmella Commands
“You need not tell Mrs. Barrington.”
Carmella looked at her father shrewdly, and said no more. Some day, Tommaso felt, he would be a real contractor. Already he had a few men whom he could hire and with whom he worked when there was a small cellar to be dug. But he had not reached out for big jobs, because he lacked capital to finance workmen and equipment on jobs where his own pay must come after the completion of the work.
But now, with eight thousand dollars to his credit in the bank, he was beginning to think toward bigger things. Carmella’s question had cut sharply into his thoughts on this very subject—thoughts that had begun the night he had sat while the victrola played a love song—the evening he had quarreled with his best-loved daughter.
Eight thousand dollars would finance what had before been impossible. His mind had wandered to Greendale again, for he knew there was to be action in that direction. Greendale fascinated him, moreover, for there alone he had realized the immigrant’s dream of a fair land of quick wealth and no effort. He had wondered how his land had sold so easily and at so round a price. The lots he had bought for a possible future home, surrounded by grape arbors and with a shaded seat on the side of the house.
Of Carmella’s part in it he had not dreamed. And after he had sold, he had heard nothing of the project. American papers he did not read; his Italian weekly
[140]
