The sun that had given some warmth to the early hours of the afternoon
was dimmed, later, by an overcasting of thin clouds, and the rest of
the time was passed in-doors. George smoked a friendly cigar with
Bradley in the dining-room, and after Mrs. Bradley had disappeared
for a short nap he whiled away the remaining hours with Jessie in the
parlor. They sat in two easy-chairs on opposite sides of the fireplace,
in which a handful of coal was working against the last lingering
chill of winter. The girl had partly recovered her earlier tone, and
she chatted with him in a-string of smart jocularities with the manner
which sometimes assures a doubtful caller that he has not made a
mistake in coming and that he has not remained too long after coming.
But between these uptilted strata of facetiousness there came now and
then a layer of greater seriousness, and in one of these intervals she
trenched on the domestic affairs of the Brainards.
"Poor Mayme went South the other day, didn't she? I hardly suppose you
could call it a visit?" She looked at him soberly, with her eyebrows
slightly raised.
George winced. "To visit her uncle's family," he answered. He half
wondered why he reiterated her word and even emphasized it.
"Her sister was going to run down there with her."
"I heard so."
"You see Abbie occasionally?"
"Occasionally."
"I suppose she is at the bank a good deal?"
"Not often." He fixed his eye on the last Bickerings of the coals and
lapsed into silence. It was not so easy now as once before to discuss
Abbie Brainard with Jessie Bradley.
Mrs. Bradley came in brisk and refreshed about half an hour before
train-time. The young people were chatting amusedly enough on
indifferent subjects, and she urged Ogden to stay to tea with the
clinging insistency of the suburban housekeeper.
"You can go home by moonlight; I've arranged it all for you." She drew
aside a window curtain and showed him a pale white disk in a bluish sky.
"It's full, you see. We just have cold meat and tea and biscuits--I
don't want to keep you under false pretences."
The moon kept faith with his hostess;--lighting him to the station
and following him in to town and keeping him in sight through a mile
of noisy and glaring streets. From the car-window, now and then,
as the train passed back through a string of scattered suburbs and
crossed the flat reaches of prairie-land between he was conscious
of her bland insipidity; and as he traversed the down-town business
district she raked the long parallels of the east-and-west streets
with an undiscriminating indifference that a mind less preoccupied
might have found irritating. It was all the same to that big, foolish
face--town and country were one. It had its vacuous smile for trees
and fields, and it had the same smile for the variant lights of the
street-cars, for the clamorous cab-drivers around the depots, for the
flaring jewelled guide-posts of the theatres, for the gaudy fronts
of sample-rooms, for the cheap dishevelment of occasional strayed
revellers, for the signs of chiropodists and the swinging shingles of
justices of the peace, and for a certain meditative young man, whether
he was traversing the rustic roads of Hinsdale or the sophisticated
planks of the State Street Bridge. Ogden's thoughts flowed along with a
quiet and grateful sense of the friendliness of the Bradleys, and with
many a ripple, wave, and eddy to correspond with the changing moods of
their daughter. He made a careful rehearsal of some of their bits of
talk--why had she said this? what had she meant by that? why had she
done the other? He dwelt on these matters with an absorbed speculation,
and with a young man of Ogden's temperament speculation was but the
first step on the way to love.
The spring trailed along slowly, with all its discomforts of latitude
and locality, and then came the long, fresh evenings of early June,
when domesticity brings out its rugs and druggets, and invites its
friends and neighbors to sit with it on its front steps. The Brainards
had these appendages to local housekeeping--lingering reminders of a
quick growth from village to city. Theirs was a large rug made of two
breadths of Brussels carpeting and surrounded on all four sides with a
narrow border of pink and blue flowers on a moss-colored background.
This rug covered the greater part of the long flight of lime-stone
steps. In the beautiful coolness of these fresh June evenings Abbie
frequently sat there on the topmost step, under the jig-saw lace-work
of the balcony-like canopy over the front door, while her mother
occupied a carpet camp-chair within the vestibule and languidly allowed
the long twilight to overtake her neglected chess-board. They sat out,
now, only after dark. Ogden called at intervals, and was not flattered
that the poor girl brightened at his coming; it seemed as if she must
brighten at the coming of almost anybody.
One evening he elected to tell off their long street on foot--the
street whose ornamental lamp-posts and infrequent spindling elms had
partly decided him in the selection of his first quarters. When within
a few streets of the Brainard corner he passed a house (one of a long
row) on whose front steps (as with its neighbors, right and left)
were camped a large and merry party, whose exaggerated domesticity
made it plain that they were all fellow-boarders. They occupied two
rugs as well as two chairs and a foot-stool at the head of the steps.
Through their light-minded hubbub came dominatingly a voice which Ogden
recognized, and he threw up his head to meet the frank but overdone bow
of Cornelia McNabb. Beside Cornelia sat a young man who bowed at the
same time with a somewhat forced and conscious smile. It was Burton
Brainard.
Cornelia had returned to the neighborhood of her early trials. She
considered herself now on a distinctly fashionable street; she put
"Washington Boulevard" on her cards, and thought her eight dollars a
week was none too much. She had had a plate engraved and a hundred
cards printed. She had not found it easy to dispose of many of them;
sometimes she gave them in shops, when she was asked to what address
the goods were to be sent.
"But just wait till I order my next plate!" she would say to herself.
[Illustration: "They sat out now only after dark."]
She had left one of her cards with Mrs. Gore. The poor, good soul (come
in from her baking) was quite taken aback. Then Cornelia, conscious
of too stiff an application of the social code, kissed her on coming
away and made herself more intelligible.
"Yes," Abbie was saying to Ogden, a few minutes later, "Cornelia is a
pretty smart girl. Father has come to be quite taken with her."
He noticed that she said--Cornelia.
"She takes down some of his letters, now, too," she continued. "I never
learned," she added, in a tone of slight self-reproach.
"Good Peter!" exclaimed Ogden, with a protesting admiration, "you can
do almost everything else!"
She waved aside this ardent apology, and looked rather shyly through
the rusty iron-work of the hand-rail. The syringas were in blossom; the
asphalt path had stopped its afternoon's running and had solidified
since sundown.
"I think he likes her because she isn't afraid of him. Neither are
you," she added, in a low tone, as if on an after-thought. She did not
look his way.
Ogden appreciated this appreciation of his behavior. He had always been
prompt and respectful with Brainard, but he had never knuckled down.
"He gives her letters almost every day. She corrects his mistakes."
"And he corrects hers?"
"He says she doesn't make many. When she does she sticks it out. She
talks back. That's where she's bright. It kind of irritates him, I
think, to have his--his clerks--his employés seem afraid. It pleases
him, though, when other business men are."
This piece of filial analysis fell softly and slowly on the thickening
darkness. The lamplighter was zigzagging across the wide roadway with
his kerosene torch, and the voices of talkative neighbors on the other
side of the street were brought over by the breeze along with the fumes
of burning oil.
Ogden was pleased with this touch of gilding that the daughter's
devotion applied to the father's clay. Perhaps the old man was not
hopelessly beyond the reach of idealization's hand, after all.
Besides the people on other steps around, many clattered by over the
asphalt pavement, and others promenaded slowly along the sidewalk.
These moved in couples towards the Park, whose scant clumps of citified
foliage appeared a few hundred yards away under the light of a waning
moon and a half-bemisted sprinkling of stars; many of them issued from
basement doors.
Presently another couple came sauntering along, and they paused at the
foot of the Brainard steps. They were Burt and Cornelia. Cornelia came
up and found a place on the rug that suited her, and greeted Mrs.
Brainard in a familiar and masterful manner, before which the good
woman soon boxed up her chessmen and retired. Cornelia then turned on
Ogden.
"Stiff--or bashful?"
"H'm?"
"Why didn't you stop and say a word as you passed by?"
"Oh! Yes, bashful; too many people."
"Too bad about you!" She turned to Burton. He had seated himself on
a lower step with his back to the others. His hat was on the back of
his head and his chin was propped up by his knees and elbows. He was
looking thoughtfully at the curbstone. "Come up and be sociable," she
called.
Burt rose and ascended a step or two.
"Oh, how are you, Ogden?" he said rather absently. George felt that he
should have said more, and said it sooner and said it differently.
Cornelia passed a cushion down to Burt. "There; take that and be
comfortable." She regarded him studiously. It was dark, but he was
all there--the short, thick, yellow moustache, the virile chin lately
shaved and powdered, the dense hair that rose in a level line from
the top of his forehead. Cornelia would have seen all these things in
darkness that was Egyptian. She felt her fingers working towards them.
Cornelia was dressed with a trim and subdued modishness. She had
taken a good many cues from Mrs. Floyd, and she had not been above
cultivating an intimacy with a girl who worked for the excessively dear
and fashionable house that dressed Mrs. Ingles. Mrs. Floyd had had no
need to teach Cornelia anything about grammar, but she had shown her,
all unconsciously, the advantage of a regulated use of slang.
Her fingers, debarred by the cold conventions of society from any
entanglement in the head of hair just before her, smoothed and patted
the folds in her own skirt. She further relieved herself by a high,
sniffling toss of the head and a long, deep respiration.
"Well, isn't this a great night!" she said, addressing the little party
generally. "Isn't the air splendid! I declare, I could just ramble
about till morning. And yet I suppose your mother"--to Abbie--"has
checkmated herself and gone to bed. Dear me, if there wasn't any city,
and no clatter-clatter on that machine! Seems as if I must just make
a break for the country before long--just get up home and hop into my
little boat and paddle all around that whole blessed lake!"
"Why don't you?" asked Ogden. "Can't you give yourself a vacation?" He
spoke a little wistfully; there was none ahead for him--no Underground
man ever had an outing during his first year.
"I don't see hour. They say you can't serve two masters. Well, I've
got five--four too many. At least," she tacked on, as if a closer
calculation would further increase the number of these superfluities.
"Can I go all over the building and tell each one of them that my
services are going to be demanded exclusively for several days by some
other one of them? Or shall I he sick--just for a day, at first, and
keep adding days, one at a time, until I've had a week? I don't know
what _to_ do."
"Drop the whole business," said Burt brusquely, without turning about.
"And leave all my poor people in the lurch?" she cried, as if her
employers were her most poignant concern.
"They can get somebody else."
"Oh, yes!" cried Cornelia, with mock humility; "I'm nobody; I can be
easily replaced." She cast her humility aside lightly. "I'll tell you
what I would do, though, if I was up at Pewaukee this eve. I'd paddle
down to Lakeside and back--by the light of that moon." She pointed
down the street towards the park foliage. "The moon that gilds those
fruit-tree tops--Shakespeare. And it would be a good deal brighter up
there than it is in this smoky old place."
"Can you row?" asked Ogden.
"Can I? I guess. Pair of oars made to order; and I can feather with
'em, too. Speaking of Lakeside, I know who's going to be there the last
of this month; that Miss Bradley--Mrs. Floyd's niece."
"Cousin," corrected George.
"Is it? Cousin, then. She's a lively girl; she and I would make a pair.
Only she don't look very strong."
"I thought," said he, "that she was going to Ocon--Ocon--"
Cornelia gave an encouraging ha, ha. "That's right! Take time and
you'll get it. Mow, then; Ocono--"
"Ocono--"
"Mowoc."
"Mowoc."
"Oconomowoc; easy enough when you have it. Accent on second syllable.
The only trouble is when you write it; you never know where to stop.
Well, so she _is_ going to Oconomowoc, later--to stay through July.
They're only twelve miles apart."
"You know Miss Bradley, then?" Abbie asked Ogden. "She was over here
once or twice, to see--Mayme. She seemed like a real nice girl."
Ogden bowed assent. He found himself as unwilling to discuss Jessie
Bradley with Abbie Brainard as he had been to discuss Abbie Brainard
with Jessie Bradley. Whenever he debated them it was a silent debate,
in which he himself took both sides.
"She's a high-stepper," volunteered Cornelia, filling in Ogden's
silence. "Good deal of style, too. Yet they say her father isn't so
extra well off. She's a great contriver, I expect. Well, gumption goes
a long ways; it's wriggled _me_ off my back a good many times." She
turned to Burt. "Now then, young man, do you want to walk me along to
the park? Haven't we roosted about long enough?"
"All right," said he, getting up promptly. He seemed to be smiling
appreciatively at her pertness.
"Ta!" cried Cornelia, dabbing her hand to Ogden and Abbie; and off she
went. "Perhaps you'll see us later--if you're good!"
A big, bulky figure came stamping along the walk, and reached the foot
of the steps just as Burt and Cornelia started off.
"I guess they'll be good," a heavy voice said. The voice was not
greatly disguised by its assumption of unaccustomed jocularity, and
George with a flush recognized it as Brainard's.
"Well, Abbie," he said, lumbering up the steps. And, "How are you,
Ogden?" he said to George, as he passed on and seated himself with a
loud grunt on his wife's chair.
George bit his lip; the old man had no business to misuse other
people's pronouns in that way. Cornelia's "you" might have meant one
person--if it meant more than one still it might have meant them
separately; but Brainard's perverting "they" bracketed him and his
companion in a fashion utterly unwarranted.
Brainard lingered a few moments above their heads. He made one or two
clumsy attempts at facetiousness, and George surmised that this was his
way of showing a friendliness. But his joking was much more painful
than any hectoring could have been, and George was greatly relieved
when he presently rose and retired unceremoniously into the house.