“Oh, but there is!” she insisted.  “Milo told me so. this morning.  And you’re to stay here till he comes back and can talk things over with you.  Would you care to walk around the farm and the groves with me?  Or would the sun be bad for your head?”

“It would be just the thing my head needs most,” he declared.  “Besides, I’ve heard so much of these wonderful Florida farms.  I’m mighty anxious to inspect one of them.  We can start whenever you’re ready.”

Ten minutes later they had left the lawn behind them, and had passed through the hedge into the first of the chain of citrus groves.  In front of them stretched some fifteen acres of grapefruit trees.

“This is the worst soil we have,” lectured Claire. evidently keenly interested in the theme of agriculture and glad of an attentive listener.  “It is more coral rock than anything else.  That is why Milo planted it in grapefruit.  Grapefruit will grow where almost nothing else will, you know.  Why, last year wasn’t by any means a banner season.  But he made $16,000 in gross profits off this one grapefruit orchard alone.  Of course that was gross and not net.  But it—­”

“Is there so much difference between the two?” he asked innocently.  “Down here, I mean.  Up North, we have an idea that all you Floridians need do is to stick a switch into the rich soil, and let it grow.  We picture you as loafing around in dreamy idleness till it’s time to gather your fruit and to sell it at egregious prices to us poor Northerners.”

“It’s a lovely picture,” she retorted.  “And it’s exactly upside down, like most Northern ideas of Florida.  When it comes to picking the fruit and shipping it North—­that’s the one time we can loaf.  For we don’t pick it or ship it.  That’s done for us on contract.  It’s our lazy time.  But every other step is a fight.  For instance, there’s the woolly white fly and there’s the rust mite and there’s the purple scale. and there are a million other pests just as bad.  And we have to battle with them. all the time.  And when we spray with the pumping engine. the sand is certain to get into the engine and ruin it.  And when we—­”

“I had no notion that—­”

“No Northerners have,” she said, warming to her theme.  “I wish I could set some of them to scrubbing orange-trunks with soap-and-water and spraying acre after acre, as we do, in a wild race to keep up with the pests, knowing all the time that some careless grove owner next door may let the rust mite or the black fly get the better of his grove and let it drift over into ours.  Then there’s always the chance that a grove may get so infected that the government will order it destroyed, —­wiped out ....  I’ve been talking just about the citrus fruits, the grapefruit and the tangeloes and oranges and all that.  Pretty much the same thing applies to all our crops down here.  We’ve as many blights and pests and weather-troubles as you have in the North.  And now and then, even in Dade County, we get a frost that does more damage than a forest fire.”