Late one afternoon Ogden drew down his desk-top, put on his
street-coat, felt in his pocket to be sure that Atwater's tasteful
memorandum was still there, and took the elevator up to the eighteenth
floor. He had been as conscious of that memorandum all through the
day as he would have been of a mustard-plaster. On taking it out and
recreasing its immaculate folds he almost felt as if he were about to
dispute a debt of honor.
Atwater was in, but he was completely taken up in radiating his careful
affability upon some promising clients who wanted not only doors but
the house that went with them. Ogden got no closer to him than to
secure the attention of the clerk whose duty it was to mediate between
the contractors and the plans they were to follow.
He was an alert, nervous young man, with a big shock of unruly hair
and a pair of large, luminous eyes behind his hooked and shimmering
spectacles. He ran his long, lean, inky fingers through his hair,
and transferred his wide eyes from the memorandum to the man who had
brought it in.
"No," he said presently; "it's all right--there's no mistake. Mr.
Atwater took a good deal of interest in this work. He sketched out some
of the drawings himself, to start with, and he even touched up a few of
them to finish with."
"Touched up a few of them to finish with?" George repeated, inquiringly.
"Yes; he don't do that often. When he does, it makes a difference; it
ought to."
The whole matter was coming to assume the aspect of a personal favor;
it was a debt of honor, after all. The grocer, the upholsterer, and the
rest of them might wait; it would give them time to learn the value of
an elegant "presence" and the compelling force of personal acquaintance.
The doors, hung and paid for, swung open many times during the
following winter and spring, to admit people whom, as his wife assured
him, it was an advantage to know. He became conscious that she was
actuated by motives quite different from his, and that she had a
standard quite at variance from any that he himself would have set up.
She strained for people that he would not have turned his hand for.
Most of these had familiar names, and it sometimes seemed to him as if
many of them had had their place in the social yearnings of Cornelia
McNabb. Certainly, his wife's attitude was quite different from that
of the Floyds, who had been disposed to pooh-pooh quietly almost
everybody, and also from that of her own parents, who simply accepted
the circle that chance and association had formed for them, and met
everybody on the same dead level of good-will.
During Lent his wife arranged a small musicale; another Mary Munson
had arrived--this time from Cincinnati. The names of the performers
included only those of amateurs of the better sort--since she knew that
good professional services were quite beyond her reach; yet chairs,
awning, and refreshments called for the expense of outside supervision.
The morning before it she put a slip of paper into his hands.
"You are going right past the _Tribune._ Won't you just leave this with
them?"
It was an announcement of her musicale. It included a list of
names--not those of the performers, but those of the listeners.
"All old friends--in print," her husband commented. "What do you care
for these people? Why don't you ask the Fairchilds?--they're quiet, but
they're nice; and they like music. Why don't you have your father and
mother? I haven't seen either of them for a month."
His wife writhed delicately in protest. Her winter had increased her
paleness. The blue veins were bluer in her temples; her large eyes
looked larger yet, and there were faint circles under them.
"Well, Cecilia doesn't fancy Mrs. Fairchild very much, in the first
place--"
George bit his lip. By the curious workings of chance he had never yet
seen Cecilia Ingles, but he no longer joked about her non-actuality.
She appeared to be looming up as the great power in his household.
"--and besides," she proceeded, "who would recognize their names if
they saw them in print?"
George stood like a looker-on at a transformation-scene, before whose
eyes the gauze veils are lifted one by one in slow succession.
"Oh, then," he said, and less in jest than in earnest, "there is no use
in enjoying ourselves unless we put it in the papers, and no use of
putting it in the papers unless we can give a list of names, and no--"
"Now, George!" She flushed with vexation.
"--and no use of putting in a list of names unless they are names that
will be generally recognized. Well, that _does_ cut out the Fairchilds,
and your poor mother, too. And mine." He looked at her narrowly.
"Now, George," she cried again, "how can you be so disagreeable? You
know papa and mamma wouldn't care anything for this; nor your mother,
either. And it isn't the only thing I'm ever going to have. I can ask
her yet, though, if you want me to."
"Oh, fiddlesticks! Only don't lose your head. Here; give me that
precious notice. Perhaps, before long, people who are after names will
be just as anxious to get yours."
"You silly boy!" she cried, striking him lightly across the shoulder.
But she was pleased and gratified by this, and she was not able to
conceal it.
Following Lent there was the usual social aftermath. For Mrs. George
Milward Ogden the major stress of the season was over, but she gave
a few luncheons, and she went to a good many others. These little
functions sent dozens of ladies tripping through the raw winds and the
slushy streets of spring. The lake, weltering under the gray skies of
March, dashed its vicious sprays high over the sea-wall, and sent its
cruel blasts gashingly through the streets that ended on its confines.
And at such signals asthma and bronchitis and pneumonia dug their
clutching fingers into the throats and lungs of thousands of tender
sufferers.
Jessie's supplementary doings were of too informal a nature to demand
the entrance of outside help, but at the same time they were of a
kind to lay the maximum strain upon the small and simply organized
household which was all that her husband was as yet able to maintain.
About every so often the domestic tension overtook the breaking-point.
An interregnum would follow, and then a change of dynasty. The blame
for these economic hitches George was obliged to distribute with an
even hand. He acknowledged frankly the mere muddishness of most of
the peasant material that oozed in and out of his kitchen; but he was
also obliged to recognize the utter tactlessness of his wife and the
folly of her unguarded exhibitions of conscious superiority. She had
never before been able to issue directions to two servants, and she
had never acquired the practical experience necessary for the control
of even one. She referred to her servants in their own hearing _as_
servants; and this did not seem to her as inconsiderate from the point
of humanity or unwise as a mere matter of policy.
The burden of this fell principally upon her husband. He was obliged
now and then to temporize with an indignant cook to secure a dinner
for the evening; on one occasion he employed all his finesse to effect
without scandal the removal of a frantic chamber-maid; and he became
more familiarly known to the intelligence offices than he had ever
expected to be. His wife was manifestly incapable of keeping a house,
and he was committed to housekeeping for a year to come.
March passed and April came. One evening they sat together in their
little parlor. The weather outside was raw and rainy, and not all
of its chill could be kept out by the grate-fire over which Jessie
was cowering and shivering. She wore a fleecy wrap on which her thin
fingers took a sinuous clutch, and she was nursing a cold whose
sniffling discomfort seemed passing into an obstinate cough. She was
running over the newspaper carelessly.
"I see Mayme Brainard's 'mother has just died," she said presently.
"'On the eighth of April, at her residence'--and all that--'Abigail
Brainard, aged fifty-six years.' Wasn't she any older than that? Well,
I suppose not. No great change for her, is it?"
"What did she die of?"
"Oh, it was her lungs. It's a wonder that anybody lives through these
springs. I can't think why we ever got so close to the lake as this. I
don't feel sure of getting through another winter here myself."
She leaned forward to stir the fire, and then lay back, coughing.
"I suppose they'll let Mayme come home, now--for the funeral, anyway.
I wonder if shell bring the baby; he swears he won't see it. Cornelia
says it's a pretty little thing--Abbie was down there a month ago."
George stared at the fire thoughtfully, and reached mechanically for
the poker.
"I don't know how they will feel, now, about staying in that house,"
she went on. "Cornelia wants to move the whole family over here, but
Abbie won't listen to her. I don't know whether she likes her own part
of town, but she seems to have taken a strong dislike to this. Anyway,
she has never come near _me_, for all you helped them at her brother's
wedding. Cornelia appears to think everything of her, though, and I
guess she likes Cornelia quite a little. Funny, isn't it, that those
two--Goodness, George, don't knock the fire all to pieces. Here; let me
have it."
She took the poker from him.
"Dear me, what a miserable flue!" She looked at him discontentedly, as
she settled back wearily in her big chair. "And we've really got this
house on our hands for a whole year more?" She seemed to feel in this
one year the weight of eternity.
"That's what the lease says," he responded, soberly. "What do you say?"
his eyes seemed to ask.
She spoke her thoughts presently and at some length. She proposed
giving up the house on the first of May. Was it a passing caprice or a
serious desire? he wondered.
[Illustration: "'Goodness, George, don't knock the fire all to
pieces.'"]
"Shall you take your porch and your doors with you?"
he asked, with a sorry smile. "They cost enough to be worth
considering."
"No," she answered, with the simple literalness that builds a stone
wall in a moment. "We shouldn't need them in an apartment-house."
"That's the idea, is it?"
"Yes, it strikes me that that would be the best thing all around--an
apartment-house, with a cafe or something. Lots of nice people
live that way now. Look at Cecilia Ingles's cousin; she is invited
everywhere, and she entertains just the same as if she was in her own
house. It's too hard work for me to run things like this, and I've just
got to get farther away from this miserable lake."
"There's all the furniture."
"We could use some of it."
"And store the rest?"
"Yes--or auction it."
"Small profit in either. What are you going to do with the lease? Store
it, or auction it, or use it for furnishing?"