EXUBERANT Denverites of the early ’eighties--not the bull-team pioneers
of the ’sixties, most of whom looked on with dry humor, but the clamant
majority of tenderfoot later comers--lived strenuously in a boosters’
Paradise, acclaiming their city the Queen of the Plains and extolling
impartially its Italian skies, health-giving atmosphere and matchless
scenic surroundings; its phenomenal growth, wealth and hilarious
“wide-openness.”
To this trumpeting mother of mining-camps came the Follansbees, fresh
from an America which was slow to concede an America west of the
Alleghenies; the judge, a fine, upstanding gentleman of the old school,
with silvering hair and beard; his wife, an ample and gracious lady
corseted to the moment and expert in the use of fan and lorgnette;
their son Thomas, a spectacled young man who had had a post-graduate
year at Oxford, returning with a pronounced English accent and as the
introducer of the curious English custom of wearing spats; an elder
daughter fully bearing out Bromley’s description of her as a “glorious
blonde,” and a younger, thin and pale, with wistful eyes looking out
upon a world which would always be alien to them.
True to his traditions, Bromley joined Thurlow in meeting the
migrants-for-health’s-sake at the Union Depot, saw them carriaged for
their hotel, saw to the transfer of their luggage, and afterward called
at the hotel, dutifully and at the proper hour, to pay his respects
and to place himself, as a somewhat seasoned Denverite, at the service
of the family in helping to find summer quarters in which the invalid
Lucy Ann could have the benefits to be derived from the miracle-working
climate.
“Their reactions to the ‘wild and woolly’ are delightful to behold,”
Bromley told Philip that night at dinner. “The judge and Lucy Ann take
things as they are; but Mrs. Aurelia and Tom and Eugie are distinctly
disappointed at finding themselves surrounded by all the comforts and
most of the luxuries of civilization. I don’t know just what they were
expecting to find, but they evidently haven’t found it--yet.”
“They will live at the Windsor?” Philip asked.
“Oh, no; their idea is to take a ‘villa,’ as Tom calls it, somewhere
in the suburbs and settle down in a housekeeping way. And, by the by,
Tom is a joke--a shout! He used to be a rather decent chap, as harmless
as a cockroach; a trifle on his toes, perhaps, because the Follansbees
date back to Colonial times, but otherwise quite bearable. But he spent
last year in England, at Oxford, and now he does everything but drop
his ‘h’s.’ He was out with me this afternoon and he wore a top hat and
spats. The grins we met, if put end to end, would reach from here to
Leadville. He calls me ‘my deah fellaw.’”
“And the fair Eugenia?” Philip inquired maliciously.
Bromley sighed and shook his head.
“I’m still a ruined community. She is as fair as ever and she hasn’t
changed a particle. I was in hopes some really good chap had cut in by
this time, but I am afraid she is still taking the parental bargain as
a matter of course.”
Philip’s grin was sardonic.
“And as long as she does, you’ll have to. Still, this is a man’s town,
and perhaps you won’t bulk so large in the lady’s imagination after she
has had time to look the Western collection over.”
Bromley shook his head again. “I shall feel like a cad doing it, but
she shan’t lack for introductions, Phil; I’ll promise you that. Want to
go around to the Windsor with me after dinner and meet them?”
Philip’s laugh was a bray. “And let you start the introductions with
me? Thanks, I wouldn’t be that unkind to you,” he bantered.
“Let’s talk about something pleasant,” Bromley broke in whimsically;
“our friends from Mississippi, for example. You remember the little
rescue plan we were talking about last week?”
“I remember telling you that it wouldn’t work.”
“But it has worked--like a charm. I bought the West Denver cottage
Saturday: you know the neighborhood--respectable and neat, but not
gaudy--short walk across the Curtis Street bridge to the University
School for the girls--short walk to business for the dear little
hat-trimmer. After I’d got the deed safely in my pocket, I called upon
Mrs. Dabney and told her what I had ‘found.’ She wept tears of joy.”
“I don’t know how you do it,” said Philip discontentedly. “As many
times as I have been with Jean since I took her to dinner that first
evening, she has never let me see the inside of their rooms in the
Whittle Block.”
The play-boy laughed.
“You know the saying about fools rushing in where angels fear to tread.
I got my foot in the door the first time I walked home with her--the
day you went to Boulder. The younger girls took to me and called me
‘Uncle Harry’; and after that it was easy.”
“Still, I don’t see how you got Mrs. Dabney’s consent to fall in with
your cottage scheme. I tried to offer Jean a loan, and she froze me so
quick----”
“Of course she would. That was what you might call the heavy-hand
method. I had to tell a few white lies about the cottage, but that was
all in the day’s work. A mining friend of mine was moving his family to
the Gunnison country and was willing to let his furnished house cheap
to the right kind of tenants. Past that, all that was needed was to
make the rent fit the Dabney purse.”
“But you haven’t fooled Jean with any such cock-and-bull story as that.”
“Haven’t I? That remains to be seen. Anyway, they are taking possession
to-morrow, and I’m to help them. You are not in it; not in one side of
it.”
“Evidently,” was the morose agreement. Then: “As I said before, I’d
like to know how you do it, Harry. You can get closer to people in
ten minutes than I can in a year. The first evening we were together
with Jean I could see that she accepted you that quick,”--with a snap
of his finger. “And she knew what you are--or rather what you were a
year ago. Don’t women, good women, care whether or not a man makes a
consummate fool of himself?”
Instead of laughing at this acerbic thrust, his usual reply to Philip’s
censorious references to his past, Bromley grew thoughtfully silent.
When he spoke, it was to say: “You may analyze women, good, bad and
indifferent, until the cows come home, Philip, but you’ll never fully
understand them; no man ever does, I think. That remark of yours
rubs shoulders with a pretty large truth. There is a good deal of
talk nowadays about the double standard. It is the women--the good
women--who, unconsciously, perhaps, do the most to maintain it. Why a
man who has sown a pretty generous acreage of wild oats should stand
a better chance with a good woman than the other sort of man--your
sort--is a question that has puzzled better brains than yours or mine.
But the fact seems to remain.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Philip doggedly.
“All right; your belief isn’t obligatory, and we won’t quarrel over it.
You asked me a question and I gave you the best answer I had in the
box. Would you like to amble across Cherry Creek and have a look at my
‘mining friend’s’ cottage on the west side? It is too fine an evening
to be wasted indoors. Besides, you’ll want to know the way.”
Together they walked down Larimer and across the bridge, turning south
in a street paralleling Cherry Creek. Three short squares brought
them to a darkened cottage on a corner; a small box of a place with
a pocket-handkerchief lawn and two half-grown cottonwoods for shade
trees. Bromley found a key and they went in. When the gas was lighted,
Philip looked around. There were three bed-rooms, a sitting-room, a
small dining-room and a lean-to kitchen, all plainly but comfortably
furnished. True, the carpets were worn and the furniture did not match;
but there was a home-like air about the place that made it seem as if
the former owners had just stepped out.
“Did you buy it all, just as it stands?” Philip asked.
“No, indeed. Just the empty house. I spent a whole day ransacking the
second-hand shops for the fittings; didn’t dare buy anything new,
naturally--that would have been a dead give-away. Like it?”
“It will do well enough--considering who did it. Of course, it’s
understood that you let me in with you on the expense?”
Bromley did not reply at once. When he did, his answer was a
conditional refusal.
“No, I think not, Phil. You don’t owe Jean Dabney anything, and I do.
If the time ever comes when you are in debt to her as I am, we’ll have
an accounting. If you have seen all you want to, let’s go.” And he
reached up to turn off the gas.
In their common sitting-room that evening, while Bromley was chuckling
over a magazine article which showed how little the writer really knew
about the Colorado to which he had evidently made no more than a flying
visit, Philip shut the _The Lady of the Aroostook_ upon a place-keeping
finger to say:
“I think I owe it to myself to tell you that I went to Middleton to-day
and apologized.”
“Of course; I knew you’d do that, sooner or later,” returned the
play-boy, with his best impish grin. “That is what you get for having a
conscience. What did he say?”
“He was very decent about it; doesn’t seem to bear malice. Shook hands
with me when I got up to go and said he couldn’t blame me so very much
for ‘losing my temper.’ Altogether, he made me feel like a fool--or
rather like a whited sepulchre.”
“Why the simile?” queried the magazine reader.
“Because I profess better things, and he doesn’t. He is a hopeless
pagan, but he shows a better Christian spirit than I did.”
This time Bromley’s grin was good-naturedly cynical.
“Deep down in your heart, Philip, you don’t really believe any such
thing as that; you know you don’t,” he said accusingly.
“Why don’t I?”
“Because, at this very moment, the old self-righteous Puritan in you is
patting itself on the back for its superior virtue and for the humility
in which you kept the letter of the Gospel to your own satisfaction and
comfort.”
“Oh, to the devil with you and your hair-splitting philosophy!” said
Philip impatiently; and, relighting his pipe, he went on with his
reading of the Howells novel.