On each trip Larry made swift visits to several of the properties, until finally he had covered the entire list Miss Sherwood had furnished him through the agents.  His survey corroborated his surmise.  The property, mostly neglected apartment and tenement houses, was in an almost equally bad way whether one regarded it from the standpoint of sanitation, comfort, or cold financial returns.  The fault for this was due to the fact that the Sherwoods had left the property entirely in the care of the agents, and the agents, being old, old-fashioned, and weary of business to the point of being almost ready to retire, had left the property to itself.

Prompted by these bad conditions, and to some degree by the then critical housing famine, with its records of some thousands of families having no place at all to go and some thousands of families being compelled for the sake of mere shelter to pay two and three times what they could afford for a few poor rooms, and with its records of profiteering landlords, Larry began to make notes for a plan which he intended later to elaborate—­a plan which he tentatively entitled:  “Suggestions for the Development of Sherwood Real-Estate Holdings.”  Larry, knowing from the stubs of Miss Sherwood’s checkbook what would be likely to please her, gave as much consideration to Service as to Profit.  The basis of his growing plan was good apartments at fair rentals.  That he saw as the greatest of public services in the present crisis.  But the return upon the investment had to be a reasonable one.  Larry did not believe in Charity, except for extreme cases.  He believed, and his belief had grown out of a wide experience with many kinds of people, that Charity, of course to a smaller extent, was as definitely a source of social evil as the then much-talked-of Profiteering.

In the meantime he was seeing his old friend, Joe Ellison, every day; perhaps smoking with Ellison in his cottage after he had finished his day’s work among the roses, perhaps walking along the bluff which hung above the Sound, whose cool, clear waters splashed with vacation laziness upon the shingle.  The two men rarely spoke, and never of the past.  Larry was well acquainted with, and understood, the older man’s deep-rooted wish to avoid all talk bearing upon deeds and associates of other days; that was a part of his life and a phase of existence that Joe Ellison was trying to forget, and Larry by his silence deferred to his friend’s desire.

On the day after Joe Ellison’s visit to the Duchess, Larry had received a note from his grandmother, addressed, of course, to “Mr. Brandon.”  There was no danger in her writing Larry if she took adequate precautions:  mail addressed to Cedar Crest was not bothered by postal and police officials; it was only mail which came to the house of the Duchess which received the attention of these gentlemen.