The Cliff-Dwellers E-Book

Henry Blake Fuller

• Herausgeber: Publisher s11838
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The Cliff-Dwellers: A Novel written by Henry Blake Fuller who was a United States novelist and short story writer. This book was published in 1893. And now republish in ebook format. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy reading this book.

Leseprobe

The Cliff-Dwellers

A Novel

By

Henry Blake Fuller

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTIONIIIIIIVVVIVIIVIIIIXXXIXIIXIIIXIVXVXVIXVIIXVIIIXIXXXXXIXXIIXXIIIXXIV

Cecilia Ingles

INTRODUCTION

Between the former site of old Fort Dearborn and the present site of our newest Board of Trade there lies a restricted yet tumultuous territory through which, during the course of the last fifty years, the rushing streams of commerce have worn many a deep and rugged chasm. These great canons—conduits, in fact, for the leaping volume of an ever-increasing prosperity—cross each other with a sort of systematic rectangularity, and in deference to the practical directness of local requirements they are in general called simply—streets. Each of these canons is closed in by a long frontage of towering cliffs, and these soaring walls of brick and limestone and granite rise higher and higher with each succeeding year, according as the work of erosion at their bases goes onward—the work of that seething flood of carts, carriages, omnibuses, cabs, cars, messengers, shoppers, clerks, and capitalists, which surges with increasing violence for every passing day. This erosion, proceeding with a sort of fateful regularity, has come to be a matter of constant and growing interest. Means have been found to measure its progress—just as a scale has been arranged to measure the rising of the Nile or to gauge the draught of an ocean liner. In this case the unit of measurement is called the "story." Ten years ago the most rushing and irrepressible of the torrents which devastate Chicago had not worn its bed to a greater depth than that indicated seven of these "stories." This depth has since increased to eight—to ten—to fourteen—to sixteen, until some of the leading avenues of activity promise soon to become little more than mere obscure trails half lost between the bases of perpendicular precipices.

High above this architectural upheaval rise yet other structures in crag-like isolation. El Capitan is duplicated time and again both in bulk and in stature, and around him the floating spray of the Bridal Veil is woven by the breezes of lake and prairie from the warp of soot-flakes and the woof of damp-drenched smoke.

The explorer who has climbed to the shoulder of one of these great captains and has found one of the thinnest folds in the veil may readily make out the nature of the surrounding country. The rugged and erratic plateau of the Bad Lands lies before him in all its hideousness and impracticability. It is a wild tract full of sudden falls, unexpected rises, precipitous dislocations. The high and the low are met together. The big and the little alternate in a rapid and illogical succession. Its perilous trails are followed successfully by but few—by a lineman, perhaps, who is balanced on a cornice, by a roofer astride some dizzy gable, by a youth here and there whose early apprehension of the main chance and the multiplication table has stood him in good stead. This country is a treeless country—if we overlook the "forest of chimneys" comprised in a bird's-eye view of any great city, and if we are unable to detect any botanical analogies in the lofty articulated iron funnels whose ramifying cables reach out wherever they can, to fasten wherever they may. It is a shrubless country—if we give no heed to the gnarled carpentry of the awkward frame-works which carry the telegraph, and which are set askew on such dizzy corners as the course of the wires may compel. It is an arid country—if we overlook the numberless tanks that squat on the high angles of alley walls, or if we fail to see the little pools of tar and gravel that ooze and shimmer in the summer sun on the roofs of old-fashioned buildings of the humbler sort. It is an airless country—if by air we mean the mere combination of oxygen and nitrogen which is commonly indicated by that name. For here the medium of sight, sound, light, and life becomes largely carbonaceous, and the remoter peaks of this mighty yet unprepossessing landscape loom up grandly, but vaguely, through swathing mists of coal-smoke.

From such conditions as these—along with the Tacoma, the Monadnock, and a great host of other modern monsters—towers the Clifton. From the beer-hall in its basement to the barber-shop just under its roof the Clifton stands full eighteen stories tall. Its hundreds of windows glitter with multitudinous letterings in gold and in silver, and on summer afternoons its awnings flutter score on score in the tepid breezes that sometimes come up from Indiana. Four ladder-like constructions which rise skyward stage by stage promote the agility of the clambering hordes that swarm within it, and ten elevators—devices unknown to the real, aboriginal inhabitants—ameliorate the daily cliff-climbing for the frail of physique and the pressed for time.

The tribe inhabiting the Clifton is large and rather heterogeneous. All told, it numbers about four thousand souls. It includes bankers, capitalists, lawyers, "promoters"; brokers in bonds, stocks, pork, oil, mortgages; real-estate people and railroad people and insurance people—life, fire, marine, accident; a host of principals, agents, middlemen, clerks, cashiers, stenographers, and errand-boys; and the necessary force of engineers, janitors, scrub-women, and elevator-hands.

All these thousands gather daily around their own great camp-fire. This fire heats the four big boilers under the pavement of the court which lies just behind, and it sends aloft a vast plume of smoke to mingle with those of other like communities that are settled round about. These same thousands may also gather—in instalments—at their tribal feast, for the Clifton has its own lunch-counter just off one corner of the grand court, as well as a restaurant several floors higher up. The members of the tribe may also smoke the pipe of peace among themselves whenever so minded, for the Clifton has its own cigar-stand just within the principal entrance. Newspapers and periodicals, too, are sold at the same place. The warriors may also communicate their messages, hostile or friendly, to chiefs more or less remote; for there is a telegraph office in the corridor and a squad of messenger-boys in wait close by.

In a word, the Clifton aims to be complete within itself, and it will be unnecessary for us to go afield either far or frequently during the present simple succession of brief episodes in the lives of the Cliff-dwellers.

I

On the tenth floor of the Clifton is the office of the Massachusetts Brass Company.

Those whose minds are attuned to an appreciation of upholstery and kindred matters pronounce this little suite the gem of the whole establishment. Even many who are not adepts in the matter of house-furnishing, and who are much too rushed and preoccupied to become such, have been known to pause in their course through the Clifton's long corridors, on occasions when the ribbed glass door of the Brass Company happened to be standing ajar, and to say to themselves, with certain home offices in mind,

"Now, why can't our people do as much for us?"

Indeed, there is cause enough for envy in that small square of velvety Axminster, in the harmonious tinting of the walls, in the padded leather backs of the swivel chairs, in the polished brightness of the cherry desk-tops, in the fresh blotting-pads and the immaculate inkstands. To sit in this pleasant little apartment for half an hour is to receive quite a new impression of the possible luxury of business, the ultimate elegance of trade. This may be managed as easily as not if you happen to have any dealings with "D. Walworth Floyd, Agt."—according to the legend on the translucent pane of the door—who is quite unlikely to hurry you out before you have finished.

"Don't be in such a drive," he will perhaps say to you; "stay and smoke a cigar."

For business is not too exacting a consideration with the western branch of the Massachusetts Brass Company. It is less a hive of industry than a social exchange. The hours are easy, and the habitues are as frequently callers as customers. They are often Jacks or Toms, whose fathers are social pillars in Boston and large land-owners in Wyoming and Dakota, and Jack and Tom—birds of passage in Scotch cheviots and billycock hats—are given to alighting for a brief breathing-spell on this lofty perch, where they reproach the slipshod dress and careless, speech of their friend's small office force by the trim neatness of their own clothes and conversation.

It may be guessed that this snug haven of refuge has been established and maintained less to extend the Company's trade than to provide a place for the Company's Walworth. I say Company's Walworth, for in this case "company" and "family" are interchangeable terms. The Massachusetts Brass Company is the Floyd family, and the Floyd family is the Massachusetts Brass Company. The Company pays no dividends, but it is very generous in its salaries. It is liberal with Hosea G. Floyd, who is its president, and with Winthrop C. Floyd, who is its treasurer, and with H. Lovell Floyd, who is its New York agent, and with Cadwallader P. Floyd, who looks after the Philadelphia interests; nor does it quite forget D. Walworth Floyd, who holds up one end more or less effectively in the West. But Walworth is the last and the youngest of the Floyds; his marriage was not to the complete satisfaction of his family, and his single independent venture before leaving home, in the direction of coffee and spices, compelled his brothers to put their hands into their pockets rather deeply. So, while the rest of the Floyds think that, all considered, they have rather done the fair thing by Walworth, yet Walworth, on the other hand, regards his assignment to the West as a mild form of punishment and exile.

"It does give me a little elbow-room, though."

This is the silent acknowledgment that Walworth sometimes makes to himself—but grudgingly.

Walworth Floyd is a sleek, well-fed, prosperous-looking fellow of thirty. His figure is a trifle too short and dumpy to be pronounced absolutely good; but it is always strikingly well-dressed—for he has lived in the West hardly a year as yet. His face is not handsome, but it is gentlemanly quite. One might, indeed, complain of the retreating lines of his forehead, and regret, too, that his chin, once perfect, now shows leanings towards the duplex; but, on the other hand, his well-bridged nose, you are sure, has been figuring in family portraits for the last hundred years, and his plump hands, by reason of the fine texture of the skin and the shapeliness of the nails, form a point that is distinctly aristocratic. Yet penmanship, under his manipulations, becomes a very crabbed and laborious affair, and this light species of manual labor is usually performed, so far as he is concerned, by other hands. He has a sort of general clerk, and he shares the services of a stenographer with two or three of his neighbors. He employs, too, an office-boy, who would idle away a good deal of time if Walworth were not in the habit of sending frequent communications to the steward of his club. Walworth, garmented in his plump placidity, has been accustomed to fare sumptuously every day, and to worry his head about as few things as possible. His dining he does for himself; his thinking he has somebody else do for him: His book-keeping and auditing and so on are done in the East, and a friend of his—he has no enemies—once said that his stomach was in Chicago, while his brains were in Boston.

Walworth, considering his family training and traditions, is inexplicably expansive. Even more than his limited capabilities for business, even more than the exactions of a wife whose pinched girlhood has helped her to a full appreciation of her present membership in a wealthy family, has his own open-hearted bonhomie "kept him back." He is just the man to whom one writes a letter of introduction without any sense of imposing a burden, or to whom one may present it without experiencing any great sense of embarrassment. And it is a letter of introduction, in point of fact, which is now lying half folded on the extended elbow-rest of his desk, and has been lying there for a quarter of an hour.

Most of us know something about letters of introduction—promised so thoughtlessly, written so glibly, presented so reluctantly, received so grudgingly. But when the letter is merely a trifling and insignificant line—a line which has no great importance for the bearer and can cause no great annoyance to the recipient—and when its presentation here and its accounting for there may be considered as but a minute item in the general system of social book-keeping, then we have an episode that passes quickly and lightly for all concerned. Such appears to be the situation in the office of the Massachusetts Brass Company.

"'We are living upon Pine Street.'"

Walworth is tilted back comfortably in one of his handsome chairs and sends out a casual glance through the nearest window. The sun is struggling with a half-luminous haze, and through this haze a hundred streaks of smoke are driving headlong towards the lake. A tall clock-tower looms up three or four streets away, and one of its faces—on the looker's own level—gives the hour as half-past ten.

"Well, we are living up on Pine Street, Mr. Ogden," he is saying; "just this side of the Water Works—the place where the 'wheels go round,' you know. You beat me here by a few minutes this morning, but I think I can promise to be the first on the ground when you call on us there."

He is running his fingers over the edges of several little sheets of brass. A few bunches of these, together with a set or two of brass rings of varying diameters and thicknesses, are the only intimations of merchandise that the office yields. Sometimes even these are bundled away into a drawer, and then commerce is refined completely beyond the ken of the senses.

"However, don't go. I am a little late in getting around this morning, but the mail is light. Ferguson will look after it. Sit down again."

The visitor, thus urged, sank back into the chair from which he had just risen. He was a slender young man, of good height, and his age was perhaps twenty-four. His complexion was of the colorless kind that good health alone keeps from sallowness. His hair was a light brown and fine and thick, and it fell across his temples in the two smooth wings that were made by an accurate parting in the middle. He had the beginnings of a shadowy little moustache, and a pair of good eyes which expressed a fair amount of self-reliance and any amount of hope.

"And how are you finding the West Side?" Walworth pursued. "I don't know much about it myself. This is a big town and awfully cut up. A man has to pick out his own quarter and stick to it. If you move from one side of the river to another, you bid good-by to all your old friends; you never see them again. You said you were somewhere near Union Park, I believe?"

"Yes," George Ogden answered, "I have landed in a pretty good place, and I want to stay there if I can. They're a sort of farming people —or were, to start with. They came from New York State, I believe, and haven't been here but a year or two. Is there anybody in this town who hasn't come from somewhere else, or who has been here more than a year or two?"

Walworth laughed. "I haven't. But you go around some, and you may find a few that have."

"The mother cooks, the father markets, the daughter helps to wait on table. Nice, friendly people; make me think of those at home." He smiled a little wistfully. "About the only people so far that do."

"Well, I have heard that there are some pretty good streets over there," is Walworth's vague response.

"Ours is. We have trees—all of one sort and planted regularly, I mean. And ornamental lamp-posts. And I'm only a block from the Park. Everything seems all right enough."

"I dare say; but don't you find it rather far away from—?" queried Floyd, with a sort of insinuating intentness.

However, I have no idea of reproducing Walworth's remarks on the local topography. They were voluminous, but he would be found prejudiced and but partly informed. Besides, his little tirade was presently thrown out of joint by a dislocating interruption.

Walworth always experienced a mental dislocation, slight or serious, whenever his wife called at the office. Nor were matters much helped when his wife was accompanied by her sister. It was the latter of these who now opened the door with an assured hand and who shut it after the two of them with a confirmatory slam.

"Yes, here we are," she seemed to imply.

In Mrs. Walworth Floyd our young man met a lean and anxious little body, who appeared strenuous and exacting and of the kind who, as the expression goes, are hard to get along with. She had a sharp little nose and a pair of inquisitorial eyes. She was dressed richly, but as simply as a sword in its scabbard. If Walworth spent an evening abroad it was a fair assumption that his wife knew where he was and all about it. Otherwise the sword was drawn.

"We have been almost three quarters of an hour getting here," she said in a tense way. "Something was the matter with the cable and they kept us in the tunnel nearly twenty minutes. As I tell Ann, you can always count on that sort of thing when you've got anything of real importance on hand and not much time for it. And yet we talk about the jams and delays in Tremont Street!"

She drew down her mouth and blinked her eyes indignantly. She felt all the shortcomings of her new home very keenly; she made every one of them a personal affront.

"Ann thought it was amusing. Perhaps it won't seem so after it has happened to her three or four times more."

Walworth glanced apprehensively in the direction of his sister-in-law's chair. She was understood to be in his house on a brief visit. He trusted that she was not to be exposed a second time to so annoying an accident.

Ann Wilde was a stout woman who was nearing forty. Her appearance indicated that, while she had not escaped the buffets of the world, yet her past experiences had only seasoned and toughened her for her future ones. In this earthly turmoil of give and take she seemed to have played a full inning on each side. She had begun as a poetess, she had gone on as a boardinghouse keeper, and she was now ready to take her first step as an investor. To turn from literature to lodgings indicates talent; to do so well in lodgings as to have funds for the purchase of property indicates genius. Miss "Wilde, at fourteen, was a plain child whose straggling hair was drawn back from her forehead by an india-rubber comb that passed over the top of her head from ear to ear, and she was called Annie. At seventeen, conscious of the first flutterings of sentiment and prompted by indications of increasing comeliness, she re-named herself Annette. At twenty, somewhat disappointed in the promise of beauty, yet consoled in some degree by a spreading reputation as a versifier, she changed her name to Anne. At twenty-six, as the result of a disappointment in an affair of the heart and of a growing appreciation of the modesty of her social rôle, she resignedly styled herself Anna. And at thirty-five, fully convinced of her own hopeless plainness, of the completely practical cast of things generally, and of the uselessness of flying the flag of idealism any longer, she bobbed off at the same time both her hair and her name; she presented a short-cut poll of frizzled gray and she signed herself Ann. What's in a name? Sometimes nothing; sometimes a whole biography.

"I have been telling Mr. Ogden," said Walworth, "that he ought to be in our part of town—he ought to be one of our little circle." His wife looked up rather coldly; her little circle was not open to any new candidate that the uncalculating good-nature of her husband might propose. "That house around on Hush Street could take him in, I imagine. And all the people he will want to know are right around there. Why, you have been in Worcester, Frances; you know the Parkers. Well, Mrs. Parker is Mr. Ogden's aunt—aunt, I think you said?—yes, aunt; so you see about how it is. Always glad to welcome one more Eastern pilgrim to our little what-you-may-call-it—oasis, you know."

"Why didn't you say Mr. Ogden was from the East, Walworth?" asked his wife, taxingly, and looked at the young man for the first time.

Her gaze was critical, but not forbidding.

"Yes, most of us are on the North Side," she observed.

"Ogden is as good as a neighbor already," Walworth went on, perseveringly; "a business neighbor. He is going into the Underground National. Letters and all that, you know. Pretty good for three weeks, I call it. If most of our fellows who come out here did as well in three months it would be money in Mrs. Lloyd's pocket. To think of the fives and tens and twenties that have gone to old schoolmates of Win's and to fellows who knew Lovell when he was on the road!"

Ogden flushed a little and took the first step towards a frown. It is not pleasant to contemplate your possible inclusion in the reprehensible class of the strapped and the stranded, nor to feel that only a lucky letter of recommendation has saved a friend's wife from being crossed in some caprice or balked in some whim. But Floyd, although cordial and liberal, was not invariably fine.

"They stop me on the street, and they buttonhole me in the hotels, and you can't think how many of them come right here. Of course, I always do what I can. But how do they find me out? And why is it that when I am going up home late over the viaduct and somebody is hanging about to strike some man for a quarter, I am always the man to be struck? One or two of them have actually paid me back, but—"

"Who?" asked his sister-in-law. She had a loud, rasping voice. "The men on the viaduct?"

"The others," Walworth indicated briefly.

"You are too generous," said Ogden. What a position for a man who was not to enter upon an engagement to-morrow! And what might three months be, if judged by the hopes and fears and expectations and disappointments of his three weeks!

"The Underground?" repeated Mrs. Floyd, turning towards her husband. "Isn't that Mayme Brainard's father's bank?" she asked in a general way.

"Mr. Brainard is the president," assented Ogden, with a severe smile. "I addressed myself to the cashier," he added shortly.

"I was sure I had heard of it," she rejoined, with a glacial graciousness.

"Well, if you-have heard of it, my dear," her husband joked, "how widely known it must be! You ought to have heard of it; you've had enough checks on it, I'm sure!"

But Mrs. Floyd did not pursue the subject. She looked at her sister with that prim seriousness which means something on the mind—or on two minds—and her sister returned the look in kind; and they both looked in the same fashion back and forth between Walworth and his caller. Ann Wilde snapped the catch of her hand-bag once or twice, and glanced between times at some loose papers inside it. Ferguson, in the other room, thought he perceived the approach of a domestic crisis—a disputed dress-maker's bill, perhaps. Yet there might be other reasons. He knew that the cook was sometimes impertinent, and that the market-man now and then forgot to send the white-fish. He himself was a mere boarding bachelor, yet he had come to learn something of the relief which follows the shifting of a housekeeper's cares to the shoulders of the housekeeper's husband. Ferguson had relieved the tedium of many a half-hour by short-handing bits of dialogue that accompanied connubial spats between his employer and his employer's wife.

These signs and tokens were not lost on Ogden; he rose again to go. You were they lost on Floyd himself, whose apprehension of a bad quarter of an hour was heightened by the absence, as yet, of any exact data. He had no wish to hold the field alone, and he begged Ogden not to hurry his departure.

"Where are the girls?" he asked his wife. "I thought you said they came along with you."

"They did. They are in the building. They will be up in a few minutes. That child!—somebody ought to look after her."

"Then why not wait a little while?" Floyd suggested to Ogden. "My wife's affair won't take long. Ferguson, won't you just clear off that chair out there and find the paper? And now, what is it?" he asked the two women when they were left together.

II

"Well, Ann has heard from those Minneapolis people again. And she isn't any nearer making up her mind than before."

"Here's what they say," added his sister-in-law. She took a letter out of her bag and handed it to him.

"Oh!" said Walworth. He felt half relieved, half vexed.

His wife stood by the window, rubbing her forefinger along the edges of its silver lettering.

"I don't see whatever put Minneapolis into Ann's head. There seems to be a plenty of buildings right here."

She looked at the rough brick back of a towering structure a few hundred feet away, and at the huddle of lower roofs between. From a skylight on one of these a sunbeam came reflected, and compelled her to move.

"And plenty of dirt, too, if she is after real estate; plenty to be sold, and plenty of people to sell it. I never saw a town where it was more plentiful."

She glanced downwards at the wagons and cars that were splashing through the streets after a rainy September night. "Why shouldn't there be more people to shovel it, too? You see their signs stuck up everywhere—the dealers, I mean."

"Ann can get to Minneapolis in thirteen hours," suggested Walworth, passing the end of his thumb along one of his eyebrows. "What's that, after the trip West? And then she can see for herself. You take the cars here late in the afternoon, and you get there in time for breakfast."

"I believe I'd just let it drop," said Miss Wilde, "if I happened to know positively of any good thing here. They write a nice enough letter, but I can't tell what state the building is in unless I see it. And I'm merely taking their word that the ground is worth a hundred and fifty. There's forty feet. I wonder if 'all improvements in' means that the street is paved."

"Drop it, anyway," said her sister, as if she were disembarrassing herself of some loathsome parcel. "Look around in Chicago itself. You can see what you are buying, then. Even if you do invest here, you are not compelled to live here." She became almost rigid in her disdain.

"Ah—um!" murmured Walworth, in a noncommittal way.

The door opened suddenly, and two young girls entered in a brisk fashion. The first one had a slight figure, a little above the average height. To-day people called her slender; six or eight years later they would be likely to call her lean. She had long, thin arras, and delicate, transparent hands. She had large eyes of a deep blue, and the veins were plainly outlined on her pale temples. She had a bright face and a lively manner, and seemed to be one who drew largely on her nervous force without making deposits to keep up her account. Her costume was such as to give one the idea that dress was an important matter with her.

"Well, Frankie!" she called to Mrs. Floyd, "you found your way here all right, did you? You're a clever little body! Or did Miss Wilde help you?"

Mrs. Floyd passed back the Minneapolis letter to her sister and bestowed a lady-like frown on the new-comers. She disliked to be called "Frankie," but what is to be done between cousins?

"Jessie!" she expostulated softly, indicating Ogden in the adjoining room.

"You can't think," the girl went on, to Ogden redux, "how proud my cousin is of her ignorance of Chicago. She knows where to buy her steaks, and she has mastered the shortest way down town, and that's about all. Frankie, dear, where is the City Hall?"

"Two young girls entered."

"How should I know?" returned Frances Floyd, with a weary disdain.

"Why, there's the corner of it," cried Jessie Bradley, at the window, "not two blocks off. It's big enough to see!"

"And she's been here a whole year, too!" cried her husband, proudly and fondly.

Mrs. Floyd drew Jessie Bradley aside. "I know I'm very ignorant," she said, speaking in a low tone, "but there is one thing you can tell me about, if you want to. 'Why have you been so long in getting up to the office? You said Mayme—Mayme; I suppose that means Mary—you said that she was going to stop in the bank for just two or three minutes."

Jessie looked towards her young friend, who was seated near Ogden on one of the wide window-sills. Then she turned back to her questioner, with eyes that were steady and perhaps a bit defiant.

"Well, we stopped for a minute in that insurance office on the way up. We came part way by the stairs. Mayme said she had just got to see him. I don't see how she can meet him anywhere else. They won't let him come to the house. I can't see that her brother has treated him so very well."

Mrs. Floyd's regard travelled from the culprit, before her to the greater culprit on the windowsill. Mary Brainard was a pretty little thing of eighteen, with a plump, dimpled face. She had wide eyes of baby-blue under a fluffy flaxen bang. The brim of her hat threw a shadow over her pink cheeks, and she was nibbling the finger-ends of her gloves between her firm white teeth.

Mrs. Floyd considered this picture with grave disapproval, and turned back to her young cousin a face full of severe reproach.

"Jessie, I don't like this. It wasn't a nice thing for you to do at all, and I'm sure your mother would agree with me. Don't mix in any such matter. Let her own people attend to it."

Mary Brainard noticed this whispered passage, and suspected herself under comment. Her face, rather weakly pretty generally, was quite flushed and brilliant now, and she looked out from under her wide hat with the forced audacity that a lightly esteemed nature may sometimes assume, and afterwards, to everybody's surprise, may justify. She began to chat brightly with Ogden. Her gayety, however, was evidently but the spending momentum of some recent impact, and the bright defiance with which she glanced around the group was not more a surprise to them than to herself.

Jessie Bradley crossed over to the window and found a third place on its wide sill. Walworth gathered the two ladies behind the shelter of his big desk, and the Minneapolis matter was resumed.

"No," said Jessie, as she settled down, "Mrs. D. Walworth Floyd doesn't know where the City Hall is." She was in a slightly nervous state, and she caught hold of the first piece of conversational driftwood that came her way. "I ought to have asked her something easier—where La Salle Street was, for instance. I wonder if she knows she's on it now."

"Well, Mr. Ogden is going to have a chance to learn all about La Salle Street!" cried Mayme Brainard, with the air of one who dreads the slightest pause in the talk. "He's going into the Bank, he tells me."

"That will do very well for six days in the week," declared the other. "How about the seventh?" she asked with a twinkling directness. "Are you an Episcopalian, or what?"

"What, I fancy. Why, in Borne, I suppose, I shall do as the Romans do. For the forenoon there are the newspapers, of course. Then for the afternoon—the races, perhaps. In the evening—well, the theatre, I should say. That's about the plan at my house."

"Well, I've never been to the theatre Sunday evening, nor any of my people. And I don't believe that many nice people do go, either. Perhaps you think that there are not any nice people in Chicago—I've heard the remark made. Well, there are, I can tell you—just as nice as anywhere. I suppose you've noticed the way the papers here have of collecting all the mean, hateful things that the whole country says about us, and making a column out of them. I dare say they think it's funny. I don't know but what it is. There's my own father, now. He reads those things right after the market-reports, and time and time again I've seen him laugh till he cried. Yet he isn't any fonder of a joke than anybody else. He says it's better to be abused and made fun of than not to be noticed at all. How does it strike you?"

She made a little moue, as she recalled one or two of these national love-taps.

"And I must say it's awful, too—the sort of news that is sent out from here—excursions and alarums, and nothing else. During the anarchist time folks down East were a good deal more scared than we were. And I remember, when I was at school, I read in the Philadelphia papers that typhoid fever was raging in Chicago. They gave the death-rate and everything. I came home as fast as I could. I expected to find the whole family dying. But they didn't know anything about it. And they took my pocket-money to pay the return fare. They were alive enough."

Ogden smiled. He saw that he was face to face with a true daughter of the West; she had never seen him before, and she might never see him again, yet she was talking to him with perfect friendliness and confidence. Equally, he was sure, was she a true daughter of Chicago; she had the one infallible local trait—she would rather talk to a stranger about her own town than about any other subject.

"I think we shall have to reform you," she went on presently, "in advance. I believe the proper place for you next Sunday would be St. Asaph's. But it's high, you understand. Come over; my cousin has room in her pew. There is a vested choir, and when you have heard Vibert's singing—"

She stopped, as if to appreciate her own daring—like a child lighting a match. Mary Brainard gave a little start and put her hand on her friend's arm, yet at the same time she blushed slightly—less, perhaps, in panic than in pride.

"—you will learn what it is that brings Mayme Brainard all the way over from Union Park twice every Sunday," were the words with which this sentence was mentally concluded. "It's like an angel," she continued aloud. "A certain kind of angel," she added to herself. "Do you sing?" "Yes, a little."

"Then of course you play. But that doesn't count. Do you write? But everybody does that, too. I do. Or did. I carried off a prize once. It kept me in flowers for a week. Well, what is it—dialect or psychological?"

"Business letters," answered Ogden, with a balking sobriety.

"Pshaw! Well, then, can you sketch, or can you do anything in water-colors? I did a lovely head of Desdemona once—in crayon. That was at Ogontz."

"Kodak," Ogden confessed briefly. "Views along the wharves in Boston; some pretty bits from around Stockbridge."

"My own story was in Stockbridge! Our artist on the spot!" She clapped her hands together joyfully. "What else? Can you—cook?"

"No."

"Neither can I!"

"Can you keep books?" he asked in turn.

"Not a bit."

"Well, I can."

"You take the odd trick. Wait a minute, though. How about private theatricals?" she asked.

"I have acted in them once or twice."

She looked aslant at Mary Brainard. The girl seemed glad that St. Asaph's had been dropped, but she was hoping, fearfully, that it might be taken up again.

"Well, Father Tisdale has everything just about perfect. He's from St. John the Evangelist—Boston, you know. And you ought to hear little Mike Besser. He's our butcher's boy—only eleven. Sometimes he and Russell Vibert"—the other girl vibrated at this first audacious mention of the full name—"sing duets together, and then—"

Her eyes rolled around the room in a mock ecstasy and rested on the group of elders, whose three heads just showed above the top of the desk. Walworth's face made quite a picture of discomfort and distress, as he rose from his chair with the effect of trying to shake himself loose from the complications that his wife and Sister Ann were weaving about him.

"The whole building is full of them," he said, rather pettishly; "there are half a dozen on every floor. But I don't know anything about any of them."

He looked inquiringly towards the window seat.

"Ogden might."

"How is that?" inquired the young fellow, rising.

"Some real-estate man. Mrs. Floyd's sister here has about concluded to cast in her lot with us. She wants an adviser. Perhaps you happen to know of—"

He took on the ingenuous air of one who is earnestly searching for information—in the least likely quarter.

Ogden laughed self-consciously.

"Well, now, as a matter of fact, I do. His name is McDowell. He is on the second floor above. I have a sort of personal interest in him. He will be my brother-in-law within a month or six weeks."

A slight flutter among the women—the mention of matrimony.

"Do you want to try that, Ann?" asked Floyd.

"We became acquainted with him down East, last year," Ogden went on, proud to show his newness wearing off. "He was working up a syndicate. He calls himself a hustler. He tells me he has just opened a new subdivision out south somewhere—beyond Washington Park, I believe. I think you'll find him posted."

Older people than Ogden frequently go out of their way to run cheerfully the risk of advising others in business matters.

"I believe I'll see him, anyway," decided Miss Wilde. Like all women, she embraced the personal element in every affair. The people in Minneapolis became mere myths, now that she found herself so near to the future husband of the sister of the man who had just presented a letter of introduction to her own brother-in-law. The chain was long, to be sure, and some of its links were rather weak—but it served.

Mrs. Floyd arose, shaking out the folds of her dress and smoothing away the wrinkles that the last half-hour had accumulated on her forehead.

"I have asked Mr. Ogden to go to church with us Sunday," Jessie Bradley announced to her. "And he is going to bring some Stockbridge photographs."