On the twelfth floor of the Clifton--at the far end of a long
corridor--is the office of Eugene H. McDowell, real estate.
Ogden, at the beginning of one of his brief noonings, took the elevator
up to the quarters of his coming brother-in-law.
He found McDowell stretching himself violently in his swivel chair,
which was tilted as far back as its mechanism would permit; his head
was thrown back, too, as far as anatomical considerations would allow.
His eyes would have seen the ceiling if they had not been so tight
shut; his Adam's apple appeared prominently between the turned-down
points of his collar. His desk was strewn with a litter of papers, and
the tassels depending from his map-rack began a trembling at varying
heights as Ogden closed the door behind him.
"Waugh--oo!" yawned McDowell, with his mouth at its widest. Then he let
his chair down, all at once. "Oh, it's you, George, is it?"
He used the careless and patronizing freedom of a man of thirty odd to
another several years his junior--of a man in business for himself to
a man in business for some one else--of a man who was presently to
undertake the protection and support of the other's sister.
"Sit down." He motioned Ogden to a chair which stood close to the
window--a window that looked out on the court and that commanded the
multifarious panorama of daily business going on behind the ranks and
rows of great glass sheets which formed the other three sides of the
enclosure--the ends of over-crowded desks, the digital dumb-show of
stenographers, the careful handling by shirt-sleeved clerks of the
damp yellow sheets in copying-books, the shaking fingers and nodding
heads that accompanied the persuasion and expostulation of personal
interviews.
McDowell presented a physiognomy that seemed to have been stripped
of all superfluities. He contrived to avoid the effect of absolute
leanness, yet he was without a spare ounce of flesh. His cheek-bones
did not obtrude themselves, nor were his finger-joints unduly
prominent; yet his trousers seemed more satisfactory as trousers than
his legs as legs, and his feet were in long, narrow, thin-soled shoes,
through whose flexible leather one almost divined the articulations of
his toes. His hair had shrunk back from his forehead and temples, but
his moustache sprang out as boldly and decidedly as if constructed of
steel wires. His nose was sharp; his eyes were like two gimlets. The
effect of his presence was nervous, excitant, dry to aridity. He had a
flattish chest and bony shoulders; his was an earthly tabernacle that
gave its tailor considerable cause for study.
"Tour friends called again this morning," he began, folding up two or
three documents and thrusting them into the pigeon-holes before him.
"We have had quite a session. But they're fixed finally. Does that
cousin of theirs live with them?"
"Cousin? Isn't she their sister--sister-in-law?"
"I mean the other one; Miss--Bradley, isn't it?"
"Oh! Well, no; she comes in and stays with them a week now and then.
But her people live in Hinsdale."
"Hinsdale; nice country around there. Seems as if you just had to get
outside of Cook County to find anything hilly or even rolling. I'd like
to take it up first rate. The minute you are over the county line you
get clean out of all that flat land and everything's up and down--like
around Worcester. But I don't believe they save much on taxes."
He tore some pencilled memoranda off the top of a pad and threw them
into the waste-basket.
"Yes, the sister-in-law was here, all right enough. She's a pretty
smart woman, too; got a good deal more head than any of the rest of
them. She's striking out a little late, but she may make something of
herself yet.
"But she wants to get that poetical streak out of her," he went on.
"What was it she said, now? Oh, yes; all this down-town racket came
to her like the music of a battle-hymn. Our hustling, it seems,
resembles a hand-to-hand combat from street to street--she lugged in
mediæval Florence. And to finish up with, she told me I was like a
gladiator stripped for the fray." He ran his hand down the stripes of
his handsome trousers. "What did she mean by that? Was it some of her
Boston literary business?"
He lifted his hand and thoughtfully twirled the scanty locks over one
of his ears.
"Here's a letter I got this morning from Hittie." He drew out a small
folded sheet from the bottom of a pile of correspondence. "She has
about come around to my way of thinking. There don't seem any very good
reason for my travelling away down there again, especially when your
father and mother are going to move out here anyway. I'm awful busy.
She'll have her own family at the wedding, then, and she'll give me a
show to scare up some of mine. Things are just too rushing--that's the
amount of it."
"I'm glad to have it settled one way or another," George said. "And how
about that other affair--have you made any report to father?"
"Yes. That's as good as settled. The deeds are all made out; they've
only got to be signed." He reached into one of his pigeon-holes and
brought out a bulk of bluish paper whose fractious folds were held in
some shape by a wide rubber strap. "Here's one of the abstracts--just
come in. The other is a good deal longer and the copy isn't finished. I
suppose they'll put that one on a board."
He snapped the band once or twice and put the abstract back again.
"I'm glad," he said, "that your father has finally decided to pull up
altogether and to transfer everything to the West. That old block of
his was wanting repairs all the time; I don't believe it paid him four
per cent. It takes more than soldiers' monuments and musical festivals
to make a town move."
George felt his heart give an indignant throb. He seemed to see
before him the spokesman of a community where prosperity had drugged
patriotism into unconsciousness, and where the bare scaffoldings
of materialism felt themselves quite independent of the graces and
draperies of culture. It seemed hardly possible that one short month
could make his native New England appear so small, so provincial, so
left-behind.
"You've got to have snap, go. You've got to have a big new country
behind you. How much do you suppose people in Iowa and Kansas and
Minnesota think about Down East? Not a great deal. It's Chicago they're
looking to. This town looms up before them and shuts out Boston and New
York and the whole seaboard from the sight and the thoughts of the West
and the North west and the New Northwest and the Far West and all the
other Wests yet to be invented. They read our papers, they come here to
buy and to enjoy themselves." He turned his thumb towards the ceiling,
and gave it an upward thrust that sent it through the six ceilings
above it. "If you'd go up on our roof and hear them talking--"
"Oh, well," said George; "hadn't we better get something to eat?"
"And what kind of a town is it that's wanted," pursued McDowell, as
he pulled down the cover of his desk, "to take up a big national
enterprise and put it through with a rush? A big town, of course, but
one that has grown big so fast that it hasn't had time to grow old.
One with lots of youth and plenty of momentum. Young enough to be
confident and enthusiastic, and to have no cliques and sets full of
bickerings and jealousies. A town that will all pull one way. What's
New York?" he asked, flourishing his towel from the corner where the
wash-stand stood. "It ain't a city at all; it's like London--it's a
province. Father Knickerbocker is too old, and too big and logy, and
too all-fired selfish. We are the people, right here. Well, Johnny,
you hold the fort," he called to a boy who was dividing an open-eyed
attention between this oration and his own sandwich; "I've got to have
a bite myself."
"How are you getting on downstairs?" he asked, as they tramped over
the tiles of the long corridor towards the elevators. "I hear you were
over at Brainard's house last night--he's a fine bird. And his son is
like him. He's got another, hasn't he--a younger one? In the bank,
isn't he? Used to be. Well, he might be without your knowing it. Queer
genius--his father don't know what to do with him. He's kind of in the
background, as it were. How did you happen to go over there?"
"Papers to sign. Mr. Brainard was at home, sick. It was something that
they could hardly give to any of the boys to manage. I met his other
daughter."
"Other? Didn't know he had any. Got two, has he? And two sons. Well,
he's a great old father, from all I hear, and I shouldn't--D--ow--n!"
But the elevator was too far past them to return.
"Here's another coming," said George, to whom the indicator showed that
a cab had left the top story and was half way down to their level.
Ogden had now gone through a novitiate of five or six weeks. After his
first wrench--from the East to the West--his second one--from the West
Side to the North--seemed an unimportant matter. He had learned his new
neighborhood, had made a few acquaintances there, had become familiar
with his work at the bank; and the early coming of his own family, who
had elected to swell the great westward movement by the contribution
of themselves and all their worldly goods, helped him to the feeling
of being tolerably well at home. From the vantage-ground of a secure
present and a promising future he became an interested observer of
the life that swept and swirled about him. He found that there might
be an inner quiet under all this vast and apparently unregulated din:
he recalled how, in a cotton factory or a copper foundry, the hands
talked among themselves in tones lower than the average, rather than
higher. The rumble of drays and the clang of street-car gongs became
less disconcerting; the town's swarming hordes presently appeared
less slovenly in their dress and less offensive in their manners
than his startled sensibilities had found them at first; even their
varied physiognomies began to take on a cast less comprehensively
cosmopolitan. His walks through the streets and his journeyings in
the public conveyances showed him a range of human types completely
unknown to his past experience; yet it soon came to seem possible that
all these different elements might be scheduled, classified, brought
into a sort of _catalogue raisonné_ which should give every feature its
proper place--skulls, foreheads, gaits, odors, facial angles; ears,
with their different shapes and sets; eyes, with their varying shapes
and colors; hair, with its divergent shades and textures; noses, with
their multiplied turns and outlines; dialects, brogues, patois, accents
in all their palatal and labial varieties and according to all the
differentiations in pharynx, larynx, and epiglottis.
He disposed as readily of the Germans, Irish, and Swedes as of the
negroes and the Chinese. But how to tell the Poles from the Bohemians?
How to distinguish the Sicilians from the Greeks? How to catalogue the
various grades of Jews? How to tabulate the Medes, and the Elamites,
and the Cappadocians, and the dwellers from Mesopotamia?
During the enforced leisure of his first weeks he had gone several
times to the City Hall, and had ascended in the elevator to the
reading-room of the public library. On one of these occasions a heavy
and sudden down-pour had filled the room with readers and had closed
all the windows. The down-pour without seemed but a trifle compared
with the confused cataract of conflicting nationalities within, and
the fumes of incense that the united throng caused to rise upon the
altar of learning stunned him with a sudden and sickening surprise--the
bogs of Kilkenny, the dung-heaps of the Black Forest, the miry ways of
Transylvania and Little Russia had all contributed to it.
The universal brotherhood of man appeared before him, and it smelt
of mortality--no partial, exclusive mortality, but a mortality
comprehensive, universal, condensed and averaged up from the grand
totality of items.
In a human maelstrom, of which such a scene was but a simple transitory
eddy, it was grateful to regain one's bearings in some degree, and
to get an opportunity for meeting one or two familiar drops. It had
pleased him, therefore, to find that Brainard's house was in the
neighborhood of Union Park and in the immediate vicinity of his own
first lodgings: and when he went over there with his documents in his
pocket he appreciated the privilege of ringing the bell of a door
behind which were one or two faces that he might recognize.
The Brainards lived on a corner, and the house was so set as to allow a
narrow strip of yard along the side street. It was built in the yellow
limestone which used to come from quarries at Joliet, and the architect
had shown his preference for the exaggerated keystones that had so
great a vogue in the late sixties. The house had a basement, and above
the elaborate wooden cornice there was a mansard with several windows
that were set in a frame-work of clumsy and pretentious carpentry.
Behind the house was a brick stable; it had been built of cheap
material and covered with a cheaper red wash. The dampness of the lower
walls had caused this wash to discolor and then to fall off altogether.
Around the premises there ran an old-fashioned iron fence; it stood on
a stone coping that was covered with perpendicular streaks of yellow
rust. In the yard a meandering asphalt walk led past a few lilacs and
syringas, which were looked down upon by a painful side porch that
nobody ever used. The walk in front of the house was of stone; that at
the side was of plank and showed three long lines of nail-heads.
The interior, so far as it came under Ogden's notice, was furnished
with a horrible yet consistent simplicity. The large rooms were set
sparely with chairs, tables, and sofas that represented the spoil of
Centralia, and there were few modern additions to introduce discords.
An ideal sculptured head, placed on a marble pedestal swathed in a
fringed scarf of saffron silk and set between the lace curtains so as
to show from the street, would have ruined the effect both within and
without. Perhaps the same might be said of any other house.
Brainard himself was not visible; he was only audible. His deep voice
came in a sort of deadened growl through the closed door of a small
side room; and mingled with it were the querulous tones of a woman's
voice--an elderly woman, a woman in poor health, a woman whom some
sudden and distressful stroke had brought to the verge of tears.
The house had been built in the primitive days when local architecture
was still in such exact accord with local society that anything like
graded receptions was undreamed of. Everybody who seemed too good to
be kept waiting in the hall was shown into the front parlor. This room
had a carpet whose design was in large baskets of bright flowers, and
a ceiling that was frescoed in a manner derived from a former style of
railroad decoration. This scheme of decoration centred around a massive
and contorted chandelier with eight globes. Nobody had ever seen the
whole eight "going" at one time. Lincoln and his family were on one
side of the marble mantel-piece; Grant and his family on the other.
It was in this room that Ogden was received by the elder daughter of
the house. She seemed a quiet, self-poised girl, four or five years
the senior of her sister. She amply filled her gown of gray woollen;
her hair was drawn back from her forehead and made a knot just above
the nape of her neck. She had a pair of cool, steady gray eyes. She
appeared wholesome, stable, capable of keeping herself well in hand.
"My father isn't able to see you," she said; "but if you will give me
what you have brought I will take it to him."
There was a tremulousness in her voice, quite at variance with her
manner and appearance. She put out her hand with a wavering motion; the
flaring of the gas in her face seemed to strike her with a positive
pain.
A door opened suddenly and her brother Burt came in. He was a stocky
young man three or four years older than Ogden. He seemed stuffed with
importance both present and future, both personal and parental--he was
himself and his father rolled into one.
"Abbie," he said, in a sharp, curt way, "I wish you'd find father the
copy of that report you made for him yesterday." He looked at Ogden
in a fashion that changed the young man from a person to a thing. "We
have been looking for you some time," he said. "I'll take those papers
myself."
He spoke in a way that was abrupt and autocratic. Ogden recognized it
as the utterance of a masterful nature, but he was unable to see that
the masterful nature was moved by an emotion that must be controlled
and concealed. His indignation made no allowance for this, and his
subsequent ten minutes of solitary reflection left a bitterness that
passed away but lingeringly. More and more, with every moment of this
short wait, did he feel himself a gentleman turned into a lackey by his
inferiors.
[Illustration: "A door opened suddenly, and her brother Burt came in."]
There was no salve for his wounded sensibilities save, perhaps, in the
look of dumb expostulation which the girl cast upon her brother and in
the few commonplace words which she addressed to their caller before
she went out.
"Kindly wait a few moments, and the papers will be ready to take back.
Perhaps you will find this other chair more comfortable."
It was after this fashion that he first met Abbie Brainard; met her--as
he reported it to McDowell--and hardly more.
He followed his brother-in-law into the elevator and they dropped
swiftly to the ground floor. At this level is situated the Acme Lunch
Room.
V
McDowell took a cup of tea and an expeditious doughnut standing, and
hurried away. Ogden, who had not overcome his habit of leisurely
eating, lingered behind.
The Acme occupies a square, low-ceiled room in the hindermost corner of
the Clifton: perhaps, with a lower ceiling and a situation on a level
lower still, it would have been called the Zenith. It is fitted up with
three or four oval counters, and a very close calculation of space
allows room for an infinitesimal cashier's desk as well. Each oval
encloses a high rack that is heaped with rolls, buns, and cakes, and
close to each rack stands a brace of big, cylindrical, nickel-plated
tanks that yield coffee and tea. Each oval is fringed with a row of
stools--hard-wood tops on a cast-iron base; and in warm weather a
pair of fans, which are moved by power supplied from the engine-room,
revolve aloft and agitate the stifling atmosphere.
Ogden had spent the past week in trying a succession of dairies,
lunch-rooms, and restaurants, and had ended by returning to the Acme,
which seemed as decent and convenient as any. He found a place in a
quiet corner; ordered his coffee, wheat-muffins, and pie, which all
came together; and fell to work with his eye soberly fixed on the
shining expanse of the freshly-wiped counter. Was he consistent, he
wondered, in claiming any great consideration until he could lunch at a
higher figure than fifteen or twenty cents?
The girl who had waited on him turned away, but another one, who stood
a little distance off, called her back.
"Here, Maggie, change that mince. This gentleman don't want a piece
with a whole corner knocked off."
Ogden buttered his muffin without raising his eyes. The second girl
herself placed the new cut of pie before him and stood looking down
upon him. The hour was a little late, and but three or four customers
held places around the counters. Presently she spoke.
"Well, Mister Ogden," she said, with a humorous tartness, "you don't
seem to recognize your old friends."
Ogden threw up his head. "Why, Nealie, is this you!" he exclaimed. It
was a girl who had helped wait on table at his West Side boardinghouse.
She wore a dark dress with a plain white collar. Her brows made two
fine straight lines over the yellowish green of her eyes. She had a
strong, decided face, yet there was a certain lurking delicacy in the
outlines of nose and chin.
"That's what," she replied. "I've made a change, you see. Been here
pretty near a week. Come in often?"
"I'm in the building. What was the matter with your other place?"
The girl hitched up her shoulders. "The fact of it is, I couldn't get
used to it. Never tried anything like that before."
She looked about cautiously and then resumed in a confidential voice,
"To tell the truth, I was just forced into it. Pa and ma didn't want me
to come to Chicago, but I couldn't make out that I was going to have
any terrible great show there in Pewaukee. I didn't s'pose it was going
to be so awful hard to find something to do in a big place like this.
But I made up my mind, all the same, that I wasn't going to cave in and
go back to Wisconsin--not straight off, anyway. Kept right on trotting
about. Any port in a storm, says I. And when I met that good old soul
in the intelligence office, that settled it. She only wanted a second
girl; but I thought I could stand it."
"Couldn't you?"
[Illustration: He found a place in a quiet corner.]
"I didn't tell ma, though, that I was living out. I wrote to her that
I was clerking--ten dollars a week. Ten dollars!--I'm looking for the
girl that gets more than six. I don't know what the folks would have
thought if they'd known of me a-being ordered around by a lot of young
fellers--run and fetch and carry for a parcel of strangers. It don't
come natural to me to be bossed, I can tell you."
"But Mrs. Gore used you well?"
"She did, for a fact. But it wasn't the sort of thing I wanted at all.
So I told her I guessed I'd go. 'Well,' says she, sort of resigned
like, 'if you've made up your mind to, you must, I s'pose'; she was
sorry to lose me, I know. She walked to the-basement door with me to
say good-by--with her specs on top of her head. 'Be a good girl,' says
she, 'and let us hear from you'--'most exactly what ma said when I came
away. Gray hair, just like ma's, too. 'Yes, ma'am,' says I. I didn't
say 'ma'am' because I thought I was a servant--I wasn't; but because
she was older and because I had a respect for her. And so I _shall_ let
her hear from me; when I get along a little further I'm going to call
on her. And I'm going to get along, let me tell you; I haven't jumped
on to this hobby-horse of a town just to stay still."
She nodded her head with great decision.
"It broke her all up when you went away," she resumed. "She kept
a-wondering for two or three days what the matter was. Poor soul, she's
a good deal too tender for this town. What _was_ the matter?"
"Nothing. I had friends in a different part of the city."
"In a different part of the city," she repeated. She spread her palms
far apart on the inner edge of the counter and brought her face down
almost to a level with his. "D'you know, I always liked the way you
talked; it's real genteel. And you say 'cahn't,' too. And 'dinnuh' and
'suppuh.' Hardly anybody says 'cahn't' around here--except actors. Say,
I went the other night. It cost fifty cents; but I was just wild to see
a real out-and-out city show--couldn't hold in any longer. They all
talked kind of artificial, except one man. He had a bad part--erring
son, sort o'. He talked right out in plain, every-day style, and he was
about the only one I really cared for. Of course, though, I don't like
bad men better than good ones. But your way is nice, after all."
"Thanks."
"Well, I'm in a different par-r-t of the city myself." She gave
a comprehensive glance over the sizzling coffee-urns. "Second in
command." She tapped her breast-bone. "I don't think so everlasting
much of Duggan here, but he recognizes talent. It didn't take him long
to find out what I was and he raised me. I boss and help around when
there's a rush, and now and then I take the cashier's place. It's all
just like a store. Oh," she proceeded, after a shrewd look at him, "I
know well enough what you've been thinking all this time. But here's
your counter and there's your goods; and people just say what they want
and get a check for it and pay at the door. No boarding-house in that,
is there? They don't bulldoze _us_ very much."
The door opened and a belated clerk came in.
"Here, Gretchen," she called to one of her force, "see what this man
wants." The newcomer dropped mechanically on to one of the stools and
submissively took the damaged pie that had been taken away from Ogden.
He had ordered apple.
"Most of 'em are tractable enough," she commented.
"I've got ten girls here," were her next words, "and they're quite a
fair lot. But that mooneyed German girl over there--"
"Gretchen?"
"I _call_ her Gretchen; she don't look as if she knew beans, does
she? Well, she don't. She was going on in the pantry yesterday about
the rights of man. I knew she was due to break a saucer pretty soon.
Well, she did. And we've got a Swede girl here who would be the best
all around one of the lot if it wasn't for her temper. All of a sudden
she gets mad and she stays mad, and you can't for the life of you find
out what it was that made her mad. Those three Irish girls are pretty
smart. H'm, yes; they were rigging up a strike Tuesday. They wanted
fifty cents a week more. They found out their want at a quarter to
twelve. 'All right, girls,' says I, 'you can go out if you want. Our
regular people will kick and go somewhere else for a few days, perhaps;
but the first rainy noon they'll all come in again, and they'll see
that things are running all right with a new crew, and after that
they'll stay.' Goodness me! I've heard more about rights and less about
duties this last week than I ever did before in my life. My uncle says
it's the same with him. He's the engineer here. He really got me this
place. If you look down through that grating out there as you go along
you may see him. It's talk and argue all the time--his men have more
half-baked notions than you can think of, and he's kept on the k'jump
all the time looking after things. Do _I_ kick? Do I squeal? Not much.
And if I had come in from outside with a different language, maybe, and
a different training and a different set of notions, and if I had been
a real, dyed-in-the-wool, down-trodden peasant and all my folks the
same for nobody knows how far back, perhaps I'd find some reason there
for not keeping abreast with the tolerably smart lot of people that had
let me in."
She cast a lofty eye over her various underlings. "Kind of a plain lot,
ain't we? You know there's one place like this in town where they
won't take a girl unless she's pretty. Their cashier is a regular bute.
But I wouldn't work in such a place; no, indeed."
She paused. Ogden made no response. She eyed him with a sharp
impatience.
"Not but what I could, though, if I had a mind," she remarked, with a
vindictive little explosion.
"No, I couldn't, either," she added suddenly; "they're all brunettes
this year."
And she laughed forgivingly.
"And you don't see me a-wearing rings and chains," she pursued; "I
guess not. And I sha'n't, either, until I finish my course."
"Course"? Was she hinting at the close of her earthly career?
"Yep. Shorthand. But don't hurry away." He had dropped his feet to
the floor. "Duggan went right off after the rush, and I guess I've
been hard pushed enough to enjoy a little restful conversation.
Shorthand and typewriting--that's what I'm steering for. I'll stand
this for a while--until I can do eighty words. I've begun at the
Athenæum already. I don't see why anybody should want to take
'lessons' in typewriting; it's practice you want. Same with the other.
Well, I'm practising hard enough. I-shall-be ready for b-usiness
in-three-months," she traced with her finger on the counter, giving
considerable pressure to the "b" in "business." "I'm ahead of the class
now.
"I'm educated, too," she continued. "I taught school one term up in
Waukesha County. I know how to spell--you ought to see how some of
those girls write out their notes. And I can punctuate--semicolons just
as easy as anything else. Say, do you know Mrs. Granger S. Bates?"
"I've seen her name in the papers," said Ogden, emptying his glass and
feeling in his pocket for his handkerchief.
"Sorry we don't give napkins. Well, she was a school-teacher, and look
at her now. I went by her house on Calumet Avenue last Sunday. She's
got about everything. She is one of the patronesses of the Charity
Ball. Still, I suppose she must be getting along in years--her husband
has come to be the Lord High Muck-a-muck of Most Everything; I've read
about him for years. Hope _I_ haven't got to wait till I'm fifty to
have a good time."
Ogden was shuffling his feet on the floor.
"Won't you have another piece of pie? _No?_ Well, try a cream-puff,
then; it'll be my treat. And do take time with it. Anything but fifty
men eating away like a house afire."
Only one other customer remained. The Swede girl began to collect the
cream-jugs.
"I don't care so extra much about Mrs. Bates, though. But there's Mrs.
Arthur J. Ingles, three-hundred-and-something Ontario Street--do you
know _her_? Now there's a woman that interests me. She's in the papers
every day; she goes everywhere. She's 'way up, I guess; I'd be wild if
she wasn't. She was at a dance last Tuesday, and she gave a reception
the day before, and her sister is going to be married nest month.
It's easy to follow folks since the papers began to print their names
all bunched up the way they do, and Mrs. Arthur J. is one that I've
followed pretty close. She must be young--I never see his name except
with hers. I guess he's just a society dude. Well, dudes are all right;
you've got to have 'em in a big town. You wouldn't have the whole
million and a half of us be grubbers?"
"I suppose not."
"She gave a dinner last week. Covers were laid for ten--what does that
mean?"
"Probably that she and her husband had eight people."
"She wore heliotrope satin. Ornaments, diamonds. Great, wasn't it? One
of our girls brought down a book this morning about lady Guinevere.
Guinevere--your grandmother! What are we to Lady Guinevere, or what is
Lady Guinevere to us? But when it comes to people living in your own
town, why, that's getting down to business."
"Yes, let us talk about realities--Balzac."
"I should say so," she assented, missing the allusion. "Now then, why
shouldn't _I_ be wearing heliotrope satin to dinner sometime?--if not
under the name of Cornelia McNabb, then under some other as good or
better. Anyway, I'm going to keep my hands as nice as I can; a girl
never knows what she may have a chance to become. I don't imagine it
will disfigure me much to run a typewriter. Dear me," she sighed, "how
much time I've lost! If I hadn't been such a darned goose, I might have
begun Pitman at home a year ago."
She reached down under the counter and pulled a newspaper up out of a
dark corner.
"Some lunch-rooms have papers around--as many as a dozen, sometimes;
but Duggan says this place is too cramped for him to give people any
inducement to dilly-dally. It's eat and run. So I have to buy my own.
This is the first chance I've had to look at it. I wonder what she's
been up to now."
She opened the paper and ran down its columns with an expert eye.
"Yes, here she is, first pop. _Mr. and Mrs_.--Cluett, Parker, Ingles.
My sakes, how I envy that woman! Course I don't want that she should
come down here and wash my dishes, but wouldn't I like to go up there
and eat off of hers! What did she wear?--it don't tell. Where was
it?--at Mrs. Walworth Floyd's--a small dinner. Don't know them. How
about the _Misses?_--Jameson, Parker, Wentworth--she's a great goer,
too. And here are a few _Messrs_.--Johnson, J. L. Cluett, George
Ogden--"
She stopped abruptly.
"You?"
There was a world of reproach in her voice.
"Yes."
"And you sit there and never let on! You're as mean as you can be. What
is she like? Tell me, do. Ain't she young, now? What did she wear?"
"I didn't go. I had a trip to the "West Side."
"Your name's here."
"The reporters get the names in advance. Sometimes they copy them from
cards or regrets."
"And you wasn't there?"
"Ho."
"Too bad! But you've seen her?"
"Never."
"How hateful! But you was really invited?"
"Yes."
"H'm!" she said, deliberately; "I see now why you moved. I don't blame
you. I'm trying to get along, too. We're both in the same boat."
Ogden rose.
"What else is there?" she asked herself, looking over other columns.
"Here's a marriage; it's in Milwaukee. Don't know whether it's a
society item or not. Who are they?--J. Russell Vibert is the man, and
Mary Adelaide Brainard is the woman. Both of Chicago--know 'em?" Ogden
sat down suddenly.
She eyed him curiously.
"That's the first sign I've seen that you was willing to stay a single
minute longer than you had to. You can go now, whenever you want. We've
got to clean up. So long!"