XV_With the Procession

When Jane looked up at the stroke of one and saw her aunt Lydia and

Bertie Patterson enter under the escort of Truesdale, she was not

completely pleased. Her rooms were no place for men, anyway--especially

young ones; and she had often wished that Truesdale, however worthy her

admiration and the world's, were a little less ready as to bringing his

fascinations into play. "If ever he comes down here," she thought, "he'll

wear something too striking, and he'll want to talk to the girls about

the continued stones in the magazines, or play the piano, or something;

and they'll think he's trying to flirt with them. I hate anything of that

kind--here," said Jane, virtuously.

Truesdale, however, conducted himself with an immense discretion, and

wore nothing out of the ordinary. His hats and shoes were now quite like

those of other people. His Florentine _stivaletti_ had drawn so much

attention in the street-cars that he had been obliged to give them up;

and as for the flat-brimmed high silk hat which he had brought home from

the Boulevard St. Michel, _that_ he had had to leave off after a

second trial: there were some things, he found, that people would not

stand. And his manner to-day was utterly stripped of gallantry; it was

gauged with the precise idea of meeting the approval of Bertie Patterson.

"I expect I shall seem awfully insipid," he said to himself.

Jane came to meet them from a room beyond, where she left a doughnut and

a half cup of coffee standing on a round-topped oak table. The regular

noon hour enjoyed by most of the girls was done; two or three remained

finishing their lunch or looking over the picture papers, and a couple of

them, in the little parlor, were trying duets on the piano.

"I'm the only one of the board on hand to-day," Jane explained. "So I've

been doing a little book-keeping and a little waiting and a little

everything. This is Miss Casey," she said, introducing one of the

piano-players; "and this is Miss O'Brien," introducing the other.

Miss Casey and Miss O'Brien bowed and smiled, and made a dexterous remark

apiece without too apparent an effort, and presently took an adroit

departure. They had already overrun their time, they explained.

"Walk around and look at things," suggested Jane. "We're pretty high up,

you see, but we don't save any rent, because the elevators make one floor

worth as much as another. Still, the light's good, and the air; and

there's a great deal less noise."

The others followed Jane's lead with much docility. Truesdale was

profoundly impressed by his sister's aspect under these novel conditions;

Bertie Patterson seemed to find in her the incarnation of all the town's

philanthropy; even Aunt Lydia was almost too deeply affected to chirp and

chatter with her wonted volubility.

"Here's the office," said Jane, leading them into a small, lighted closet

to one side. "This book is for our account with the butcher, and that one

is for our account with the baker. Our supplies are brought up on the

freight elevator every morning. Come and see the gas-stove, where we cook

eggs."

As they passed through the adjoining room a girl sat at one of the tables

with a piece of pie and a cup of tea. She was turning the leaves of one

of the comic weeklies, and a slight frown of intentness upon her face

indicated either a limited sense of humor or some unfamiliarity with the

subjects under review. The latter, perhaps; her face and air were

distinctly foreign.

"Poor Sophie!" said Jane, indulgently; "she's trying her English on those

jokes. She's improving, however; and she can speak French and German like

a fire-engine. I guess she's smart enough; anyway, she looks so."

The girl seemed of a type that might have come from Baden, or Alsace, or

the Franco-Swiss frontier. She had a high color and an abundance of black

hair. Her eyes, as she lifted them to Bertie Patterson, were dark and

narrow and full of sparkle and decision, and the half-frown, which still

survived from her study of the comic paper, helped to give her a look of

some force and determination.

Truesdale, on seeing her, gave a sudden start, and turned his eyes and

his face away at once. Then, with a quickened pace, he followed his

sister's lead towards the kitchen and pantry. He smiled half grimly.

"Such a thing may happen anywhere, of course," he said to himself; "but I

shouldn't have chosen it to happen right here. No--not exactly."

Bertie and Mrs. Rhodes followed after, to see the gas-stove that cooked

eggs. As they crossed the threshold, Truesdale looked back between them

towards the subject of his speculation. She had grasped her paper firmly

with both fists, and now sat with an intent stare fixed on its pages. She

neither raised nor lowered her head, nor could he observe that she looked

either to the right or to the left. "Ouf!" said Truesdale, as Jane lit up

the stove, "you never know when a thing is at an end."

Jane presently turned off her gas-stove. "You can go back through the

other room. It isn't quite so swell," she expounded, as she moved along;

"but we have several grades of girls, and each one finds her own level

and her own society for herself." She led the way back into the parlor,

and drew a finger along the key-board of the piano as she passed by.

"Anybody who wants to send a few new pieces of lively music may do so."

Two or three late lunchers had come in and were clattering their knives

and forks at the table opposite the girl whom Jane had called Sophie.

Sophie still sat in her place; she held her paper with a firm hand, and

turned the leaves at intervals. She looked up once--as the party was

passing out. Truesdale stepped over the door-mat rapidly, on the far side

of Jane and Bertie and Mrs. Rhodes. He dropped his glove that he might

stoop for it, and as he stooped he shot a rapid glance through the narrow

door of the other room. The girl still held her paper before her face,

but she sent a single look after the party athwart its side.

Truesdale stepped into the hall and pressed the button of the elevator.

"It's Sophie, true enough--not a bit of doubt about it. If she didn't

recognize me just now, she'll never have I another chance to--here."

He handed his charges into the elevator. "Well, what do you think of Jane

and her doings now?" he asked, briskly, as he stepped in after them. "Can

you think of any better opening for the investment of your idle funds?

Isn't she an able financier? Hasn't she got a great administrative

capacity? Isn't she one of the rising young men of the day?" As he flung

off this string of stock phrases from the newspapers, his eyes flashed

brightly, a mounting color came into his cheeks, and a triumphant smile

to his lips, and a caressing and ringing vibration into his voice. He

seemed to coruscate with all the conquering insolence of youth; Bertie

Patterson had never seen him quite so handsome.

"Down we go!" he cried to his aunt, as the cab resumed its course with a

sudden, breath-taking drop. "No; don't catch hold of me--I'm only a

broken reed. Yes; try the door-jamb--much more satisfactory. But look out

for your fingers--never get your fingers caught." Then, as they arrived

at the street level: "Wait a second; don't hurry. Be sure of your

footing; don't stumble and break your neck at the last minute--one poor

last little chance, after so many glorious opportunities have gone by!"

"'Sh, Truesdale!" whispered his aunt.

For there were other people in the elevator, and they looked askance at

this smart volley of verbal superfluities.

He led them out to the carriage. "Here we are on solid ground once more,"

he continued; "best place in the world to be. No; don't ask me to get

in--I'll walk on a bit. I wouldn't leave terra firma now for anything."

He handed his aunt in, and then Bertie. He exacted from Bertie a

perfectly superfluous shake of the hand, bowed over that hand with a

sudden access of gravity, and lost himself in an abysmal reverie before

he had traversed a hundred yards.

He saw before him a high-heaped assemblage of red-tiled roofs, and above

them rose the fretwork of a soaring Gothic spire. A narrow river half

encircled the town, and a battered old bridge, guarded by a round-towered

gateway, led out into the open country towards a horizon bounded by a low

range of blue hills. Trumpet-calls rang out from distant barrack-yards,

and troops of dragoons clattered noisily over the rough pavement of the

great square. The dragoons passed, and a colony of awnings and umbrellas

sprang up in their place, and bands of stocky peasantry chattered and

chaffered, and left the pavement strewn with the loose leaves of cabbages

and carrot-tops. Then night came and blotted these out, and the moon rose

and music played, and throngs of officers and students and towns-people

sat through a long-drawn evening before the coffee-houses round-about.

High towards the stars towered the columns and pediments of a vast

official structure, whose broken sky-line sawed the heavens, and whose

varied cornices and ledges were disjointed by deep and perplexing

shadows. On each side of the great portal which opened through the

pillared arcade there was stationed a mounted cuirassier, and above it

there appeared in large letters--

"Marshall & Belden," said Truesdale, suddenly emerging from his reverie.

He sprang lightly over the muddy gutter and found a foothold on the damp

flagging. "Pshaw!" he said, rather ruefully; "in a moment more she would

have come to meet me."

He looked up at the building before him. "Well, really, they've made

quite a decent affair of it. But what are they doing to the sign? Oh, I

see: putting 'The' to the front of it, and 'Co.' to the back. That ladder

looks rather shaky. The Marshall & Belden Co.' Perhaps it would be civil

of me to call on the new concern--seeing that I have chanced their way."

Truesdale picked his way choicely through the office, with the urbane

affectation of never having seen the place before. One or two of the

clerks recognized him, and a hurried word, passed from desk to desk,

effected an immediate establishment of his identity throughout the room.

Those who had never seen him had at least heard about him. Some of them

had visited his pictures at the Art Institute, and, as devotees of the

old school, if of any, had mildly guyed them. Others had read paragraphs

in the "Chappie Chat" of the newspapers about his trousers and

cravats--those genial paragraphs which may so easily endow a young man of

parts and peculiarities with a quasi-celebrity. One of them now smiled

broadly, and another so far forgot himself and his dignity as to wink;

but all the rest, as American freemen by birth or adoption, united in a

stolid determination to refrain from seeing, or at least from

acknowledging, any distinguishing peculiarity, any differentiation--above

all, any savor of superiority. The one of whom Truesdale inquired for his

father was so Spartan in his brusqueness that Truesdale, despite himself,

smiled in his face.

In the private office he found his father closeted with Roger. Crumpled

and trampled on the floor, and with the effect of a matter abandoned or

at least superseded, lay a large sheet of paper printed with the outlines

of a real-estate subdivision, while a hundred similar sheets rested in a

roll on the end of the old man's desk. Marshall himself lay back in his

chair, with marks of the exhaustion that follows intense indignation and

exasperation, while Roger paced the floor with all the vehemence and

choler of younger blood.

"Yes," Roger was saying, explosively, "the bond was opened, and all they

found was a blank paper--the alderman's name, and nothing more. Why do

you blame _me_? What more can _I_ do? What more could you do? What more

could any decent man do? And if you wanted to find out how things are run

here, you're doing it."

"What's the trouble?" asked Truesdale. He sat down with an engaging

disposition to show himself interested.

Marshall passed his hand feebly over his forehead. "It's that police

affair of your mother's," he said, in a tired voice.

"Well, I hope those two scamps have been sent to jail, or to Bridewell,

or wherever they belong. August will carry that scar to his dying day."

"Jail!" cried Roger. "No ward-worker need ever go to jail. They sent for

their alderman the minute they were caught. Our ward hasn't elected

anything but crime-brokers for the last ten years."

"Well, what did the present crime-broker do?"

"He went bail for them. He made out the bond himself--inside of thirty

seconds. He marked it so on the envelope, and the police-captain took it

for what he called it. So when these fellows jumped their bail--"

"Our alderman lost--his autograph. A bad take-in for the police, wasn't

it?" queried Truesdale, impartially.

"Take-in!" cried Roger. "It's easy enough to be taken in if you want to

be taken in--if you lend yourself to being taken in!"

His father gave a long sigh and dropped a helpless hand on his desk.

Truesdale looked into vacancy and gave a long, low whistle.

"And there you have it!" ended Roger. "You have lifted off the cover and

looked in. Do you want to go deeper? You'll find a hell-broth--thieves,

gamblers, prostitutes, pawnbrokers, saloon-keepers, aldermen, heelers,

justices, bailiffs, policemen--and all concocted for us within a short

quarter of a century." He drew his hands across each other. "I've never

felt so cheap and filthy in my life."

Truesdale made no further inquiries about the Van Horns. His fastidious

nature shrank back from all these malodorous actualities. He added his

own footprints to those which already defaced the map lying on the floor,

and asked about that.

"You're interesting yourself in buying land, I imagine."

"In selling," replied Roger, curtly.

David Marshall leaned laboriously over the arm of his chair with the

intention, perhaps, of crowding the crumpled map into his waste-basket.

Instead, he gave it several neat and careful folds and thrust it

abstractedly into one of his pigeon-holes. It found place alongside of a

bill for doctor's services handed in that morning. A porter who had

fallen down three floors of the elevator shaft had been attended by one

of his own friends. The bill was exorbitant--everybody concerned knew

that. But it was rather less than a probable award for damages--everybody

knew that, too. The excess was to be shared, of course, between doctor

and patient.

"Was there anything special?" his father asked presently, with a wan and

dejected glance towards his younger son. "If not, I think I'll put on my

things and go home. I don't quite feel myself today."

"Perhaps you'd better," recommended Roger, taking the roll of maps under

his arm. "I'll have these distributed from my office during the week."

"No, nothing special," answered Truesdale; "I just happened in. And I

think," he added to himself, "that I had better lose no time in happening

out. The idea of my running up against such a tar-kettle as this! Pouf!"

As he went out he passed along the front of Belden's desk. Belden himself

sat there attended, with the sort of deferential familiarity that

suggests the confidential clerk, by the Swiss, the Alsacian, or whatever

else, who on a previous occasion had moved the curiosity of Bingham.

This man caught sight of Truesdale as he passed, and gave him an instant

glance of recognition. He at once bowed his head over Belden's desk, so

as to hide his face among its papers. "A gentleman to see you sir?" he