The betrothal and impending marriage of Daniel Leitzel was the only
topic of discussion that evening at the New Munich Country Club dance.
Certainly New Munich had a Country Club. "Up to date in every
particular." There was nothing in the way of being smartly fashionable
that the town of New Munich lacked. Well, if up to the present it had
lacked old families of "distinguished lineage," who, in these
commercial days, regarded that kind of thing? Anyway, was not that
lack (if lack it had been) now to be supplied by the newcomer, Mrs.
Daniel Leitzel?
Not only at the Country Club dance, but wherever two or three were
gathered together--at the mid-week Prayer Meeting, at the Woman's
Suffrage Headquarters, at the Ladies' Literary Club, at the Episcopal
Church Vespers, at the auction bridge given at Congressman Ocksreider's
home--Danny Leitzel's betrothal was talked about.
"Just imagine this 'daughter of a thousand earls----'"
"Governors, not earls," corrected Mr. Schaeffer, the whist partner of
the first speaker who was Miss Myrtle Deibert, as supper was being
served at eleven o'clock on the card tables at Congressman
Ocksreider's. "A thousand governors and highbrows--shy-lologists, or
something like that--whatever _they_ are!"
"Well, just imagine such a person living at the Leitzels!"
"But you don't suppose Danny's sisters will still live with him after
he's married!" exclaimed Mr. Bleichert, the second young man at the
table.
"If he thinks it more economical, they certainly will," declared Miss
Myrtle Deibert.
"Whew!" exclaimed Mr. Bleichert. "Good-_night_!"
"Who would have supposed any nice girl would have married old Danny
Leitzel!" marvelled Mr. Schaeffer.
"Oh, come now," protested Mr. Bleichert who was a cynic, "why have all
the girls, from the buds just out, up to the bargain-counter maidens in
their fourth 'season,' been inviting Danny Leitzel to everything going,
and running after him heels over head, ever since he built his ugly,
expensive brick house on Main Street? Tell me that, will you?"
It should be stated here that it was an accepted social custom in New
Munich for the people at one card table to discuss the clothes,
manners, and morals of those at the next table.
"You know perfectly well," retorted Miss Deibert, "that at least two
girls in this town, when it came to the point of _marrying_ Danny,
chucked it."
"I should think they might," said Schaeffer. "Why, he isn't a man,
he's a weasel, a rat, a money-slot!"
"Well, of course, the girl or old maid, 'bird or devil,' that has
caught him at last, isn't marrying him for himself, but for his money,"
serenely affirmed Myrtle Deibert.
"When she meets his two appendages, Miss Jennie and Miss Sadie, she'll
wish she was single again!" predicted Mr. Bleichert.
"They'll probably think it their business to manage Danny's wife the
way they manage him," Miss Deibert declared.
"I hope she's a spendthrift," shrugged Mr. Schaeffer. "It would give
Dan Leitzel the shock he needs to find himself married to a
spendthrift."
"She won't be one after she's Mrs. Daniel Leitzel!" Miss Deibert
confidently asserted.
"But of course she's rich--Dan Leitzel wouldn't marry a dowerless
woman," said Bleichert.
"Well, then he won't let her spend _her_ money," Miss Deibert settled
that.
The second young lady at this card table, a pale, serious-looking girl,
did not join in the discussion, but sat with her eyes downcast, toying
with her food, as the rest chattered. The other three did not give
Miss Aucker credit for remaining silent because she found their gossip
vulgar and tiresome (which was indeed her true reason) but attributed
her disinclination to talk to the fact that during the past year Daniel
Leitzel had been rather noticeably attentive to her; so much so that
people had begun to look for a possible interesting outcome. Miss
Deibert, Mr. Schaeffer, and Mr. Bleichert, therefore, all considered
her demeanour just now to be an indelicately open expression of her
chagrin at the news they discussed.
"He was her last chance," Miss Deibert was thinking. "She must be
nearly thirty."
"One would think she wouldn't show her disappointment so frankly," Mr.
Schaeffer was mentally criticising her.
"You know," chuckled Miss Deibert as she dabbed with her fork at a
chicken croquet, "Danny, away from his sisters and his awful house and
among strangers, would appear so like a perfect gentleman, even if he
_is_ 'a rat, a weasel, a money-slot,' that I think even the descendant
of earls or governors might be deceived. You see he's had so many
advantages; he was only ten years old when they discovered coal on
their land and got rich over night. And from the first, his sisters
gave him every advantage they could buy for him, sending him to the
best private schools, and then to college, and then to the Harvard Law
School; and every one knows that Danny Leitzel is no fool, but a
brilliant lawyer. So I do think that, detached from his setting here,
there's nothing about Danny that would lead an unsuspecting South
Carolina bride to imagine such contingencies as Jennie and Sadie and
that Main Street house. I suppose _she_ lives in an ancestral colonial
place full of antique mahogany, the kind we all buy at junk shops when
we have money enough."
"What kind of a woman would it be that could stand Dan Leitzel's
penuriousness?" Mr. Schaeffer speculated. "He makes money like rolling
down hill and I've heard him jew down the old chore woman that scrubs
his office and haggle over a fifty-cent bill for supper at the club.
He's the worst screw I ever knew. And mind you, his bride's a Southern
woman, accustomed to liberality and gallantry and everything she won't
find at Danny's house!"
"Do you know (not many people in New Munich do seem to know) that the
Leitzels' _mother_ is living?" said Miss Deibert.
"_What?_"
"I know a woman that knows her. She lives in the Leitzels' old
farmhouse out in Martz Township."
"But Miss Jennie and Miss Sadie are too old to have a mother living."
"It's their step-mother. But she brought them up from little children
and I heard she even took in washing to support them when their own
father drank--and now they're ashamed of her and don't have anything to
do with her. I was told she's a dear old soul and never speaks against
them, but is as proud of their rise in the world as if she were their
own mother. The neighbours out there say she has a hard time getting
on and that they don't do a thing for her except let her live in their
old tumble-down farmhouse. Isn't it a shame, as rich as they are!"
"You can't believe everything you hear."
"But it would be just like them!" affirmed Bleichert.
"Mary!" Miss Deibert suddenly laid her hand playfully on that of the
silent Miss Aucker. "Congratulations on _your_ escape, my dear!"
"I was never in the least danger, Myrtle. Aren't we gossiping rather
dreadfully? I've been wondering"--she looked up with a smile that
transformed her seriousness into a gentle radiance--"what a newcomer
like Mr. Leitzel's wife, doomed to live here, will _do_ with us and our
social life, if she really is a woman of breeding and culture. I
wonder whether it would be possible this winter to make our social
coming together count for something more than--well, than just an utter
waste of time. What is there in it all--our afternoon teas, auction
bridge, luncheons, dinners, dances. The dances are of course the best
thing we do because they are at least refreshing and rejuvenating. But
don't you think, Myrtle, that we might make it all more worth while?"
"There's the Ladies' Literary Club," Myrtle suggested, "for those that
want something 'worth while,' as you put it. I think it's an awful
bore myself."
"Of course it is," Mary agreed.
"But what would you suggest then?"
"I suppose it is after all a question of what is in ourselves. A dozen
literary clubs at which we read abstracts from encyclopedias wouldn't
alter the fact that when we get together we have so little, so _little_
to give to each other!"
"Oh, I don't know!" protested Myrtle. "We all read all the latest
books and magazines and talk about them, and----"
At an adjoining table another phase of the agitating news was being
threshed out.
"If she's what the papers say she is, I suppose she'll turn up her nose
at New Munich," said the daughter of the Episcopal rector.
"Oh, I don't think she need put on any airs!" said Miss Ocksreider, the
hostess's daughter. "I've visited down South and I can tell you we're
enough more up to date here in New Munich. Nearly every one down
there, even their aristocrats, is so poor that up here they wouldn't be
anybody. It's awfully queer the way those Southerners don't care
anything about appearances. They tell you right out they can't afford
this and that, and they don't seem to think anything of wearing clothes
all out of style. There was an awfully handsome new house in the town
where I stopped, and when I asked the hotel clerk who lived in it and
if they weren't great swells, he said: 'Oh, no, they are not in
society; they're not one of our _families_, though they're very nice
people, of course, members of church and good to the poor and all like
that.' 'Not in society in a little town like this Leesburg, and living
in a mansion like _that_?' I said. Yes, that's the way they are down
there."
"How queer!" came from two of her table companions to whom, like
herself, any but money standards of value were rather vague and hazy.
"But if they don't care for money down there, then what's this girl
marrying Dan Leitzel for?" one of the men candidly wondered.
"Well, you know there's no accounting for tastes."
"I could excuse any woman's marrying for money--in these days it's only
prudent," said the candid one; "but I certainly couldn't respect a
woman that married Dan Leitzel for anything _else_."
"It's to be hoped she's an up-to-date girl and not a clinging vine, for
Danny will need very firm handling to make him part with enough money
to keep her in gloves and slippers and other necessary luxuries," said
Miss Ocksreider.
"Yes, if it were only her husband that she'll have to manage; but there
are Miss Jennie and Miss Sadie, too!" cried the rector's daughter.
"Danny doesn't so much as put on a necktie without consulting them.
They even tie it for him and part his hair for him."
"That may be," said one of the men, "but let me tell you that any one
who thinks Dan Leitzel hasn't any force of character better take
another guess. If he lets his sisters choose his neckties for him,
it's because he doesn't want to do it himself. He's the most
consummately selfish individual I've ever known in the whole course of
my long and useful life and the most immovably obstinate. Weak? Why,
when that fellow takes a notion, he's a mule for sticking to it.
Reason with him? Go out in your chicken yard and reason with your
hens. It wouldn't be as futile!"
"_He_ may be independent of his sisters, but his wife won't be!"
prophesied the rector's daughter darkly.
"Anyway," said Miss Ocksreider, "it will be interesting, won't it, to
look on this winter at the drama or comedy or tragedy, as the case may
be, of Danny Leitzel's marriage?"
"Won't it!" exclaimed in chorus her hearers.
But at one of the other tables a man was at this moment remarking: "You
may all laugh at Dan Leitzel--he's funny of course--but he's all the
same a man of brains and education, of wealth and influence and power.
In short, he's a _successful_ man. And in Pennsylvania who asks
anything more of a man?"