Chapter XIV

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.

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.