Chapter VI

Ogden had been balked in his first social advance by the inconsiderate and unwarranted demands of the Brainards. He failed on Proposition No. I., but its attendant corollary he disposed of after the proper interval. He had missed the dinner, but he accomplished the dinner call.

He was moving around his room in his shirtsleeves; he had the leisurely air of one whose social orbit was so small as to involve no relations with the courses of cabs and of street-cars. To set himself right with the Floyds he had but to step around the corner.

His room was rather small and cramped, but he had preferred indifferent accommodations in a good house to good accommodations in an indifferent house--just as he would have chosen an indifferent house in a good neighborhood to a better house in a poorer one. His quarters, however, were well enough for a single young man of moderate pretensions. He had space for a three-quarter bed, a bureau, a wash-stand which displayed a set of pink-flowered crockery and two towels, a cane-seated chair, and a pair of book-shelves on the wall. And by means of a good deal of dexterous manœuvring he contrived to extract some comfort from an undersized rocker. His decorations were principally photographs, which showed to the extent common under the circumstances. Some of these were grouped in twos and threes, in frames faced with Chinese silk; they helped to achieve the disordered and over-crowded effect that the present taste in house-furnishing aims at, and can always accomplish in a back hall bedroom.

The photographs stood in the position in which he had first placed them a month and a half ago, although the recent arrival of several of the originals had given their shadows an altered importance. Everybody knows of the inertia that overtakes decorative detail, even when portable. There were the pictures of his father and his mother, arranged in a pair. His father offered a placid, gray-bearded face; it seemed rather forceless, though that effect may have been due to retouching; yet, independent of any practical processes, it was the face of a man who obviously could not have risen in advance to any adequate conception of the Western metropolis.

The face of his mother was serious, strenuous. She had in some degree the semi-countrified aspect of one who has run a quiet course in a quiet quarter of a minor town.

His sister's picture had been taken in the East just before her starting for her new home. It was now in the hands of Ogden's next-door neighbor, who had come in carrying a choice of white ties, and who now wove around it a contemplative cloud of tobacco-smoke from his briar-wood pipe. He was a young man with a high forehead and a pair of shrewd but kindly brown eyes.

"A mighty pretty girl," Brower said, heartily. "Get the right kind of a New England face, and you can't do much better. I must haul out my own photographs and fix them up some time."

Brower kept his collection in his trunk, along with his shirts and underwear generally. He used his bureau drawers for collars and cuffs, and for a growing accumulation of newspapers, magazines, and novels. He had been in the house two years, yet his trunk had never been unpacked and put away. He was an adjuster for an insurance company, and was subject to sudden calls to remote localities, in accordance with the doings of the busy monster that the press knows as the "fire fiend." If Isaac Sobrinski, off in Des Moines, had the misfortune to be burned out, at the close of a dull season or in the face of brisk and successful competition, then Des Moines was the place to which Brower immediately posted. He estimated the damage on the building, figured the salvage on socks and ulsters, and endeavored to decide, so far as lay in his powers, whether the catastrophe had been inflicted by Providence or had been precipitated by Sobrinski's own match-box. However, he never carried anything except his valise on such excursions; the general state of his trunk is to be accepted simply as the mental index of a constant and hurried traveller.

"Yes, she's a mighty pretty girl," he repeated, thoughtfully. "Where have they gone?"

"Oh, not far. There's been a good deal of travelling done already. They just went up to Milwaukee; Eugene had something to see about there. They'll be back to-morrow, I expect."

"Milwaukee, eh? That's come to be quite the fashion, hasn't it? Some folks go there after they're married, and some of them to _be_ married. We had one in our office a week or two ago; Vibert--have you met him?"

"It's in your office he is, then, is it? No, I've never met him. I've seen him and heard about him. Is he much thought of?"

"Well, the office doesn't have a great deal to say to a man as long as he keeps hours and attends to his work--when the position isn't responsible, I mean. What are you looking for--whisk-broom? Here; I'm sitting on it, I guess."

"I suppose he does attend to his work?"

"Oh, so-so; but a little break like that doesn't help a man any. He struck high, didn't he?"

"Yes."

"Wonder what he's got to keep her on. Great question--all that; ain't it? She's a rich girl, I hear. Subject for debate: is it safer to marry a rich girl or a poor girl--for a young man in moderate circumstances, I mean?"

"Oh, dear," said Ogden, sitting down on the edge of the bed, helplessly; "if you're going back to _that_ chestnut!"

"Well, it's timely," rejoined Brower, knocking the ashes of his pipe into the cover of the soap-dish; "and always will be. Pro: if the girl's rich, she'll have had things, and got used to them, and perhaps tired of them. If the girl's poor, she'll be ravenous after her long starve-out, and will expect her husband to feed her with everything."

"Lay on."

"Con: if the girl's rich, she'll expect all the comforts and luxuries she has been used to at home. If she's poor, she'll have had some sense ground into her; she'll know how to manage and contrive. So there it is. What's your idea?" "No general rule. Depends on circumstances." "What does?"

"The girl. To begin with."

"The girl depends on circumstances. And after?"

"After? Oh, then circumstances depend on the girl."

"H'm! Can't lay down any general law--same as with little Johnny. Pshaw! You go to the foot."

But they both agreed on one point, as young men always do when they discuss this standard subject: they stood together on the assumption that such a venture concerned only the two people primarily involved.

Brower preceded Ogden into the hallway; he stood with the toe of one slipper on the heel of the other. "Well, remember me to the swells."

"Oh, shucks!" said George, turning back and laughing.

He walked down and out rather sedately, and picked his way over the muddy sidewalks with his thoughts fixed on the two recent marriages. That in his own family had just occurred under such disadvantages as must prevail in a disorganized household, and with the infliction of such discomforts as will sometimes be undergone by people who, while not in society, still feel impelled to have such a function proceed after the fashion that society prescribes. Kittie Ogden was duly married, then, with a certain regard to cards, carriages, caterers, and the rest; and the feast was graced by a number of McDowell's family and friends--people of a fairish sort, who called for little comment in either way. At least, little comment was bestowed by Ogden, whose principal thought was that his sister was now the wife of a fellow of some means and ability, and who felt that it would not come amiss to have a good business man in the family.

At the Floyds' he found the other wedding the subject of much comment, more or less discreet. On the other hand, the affair in his own family received but a mere civil mention; the Ogdens, he felt, must be only an insignificant little group, after all. Must they--must he--always remain so?

The Floyds occupied a snug little house which filled a chink between two bigger and finer ones, and commanded a view of the back yard of a third, which was bigger and finer still. Mrs. Floyd had lately begun to fill a chink in the social world as well, by having an "evening." She had approached the idea with a good deal of deliberation, and she had achieved something very small and quiet. She overcame her husband's weakness for knowing people and inviting them to the house; she was not after a deluge, but a drop; and if her tardy distillation did not equal the perfumes of the fragrant East, still it was the best result to be arrived at under the circumstances.

He found the Fairchilds there, and he came upon Fairchild and Floyd smoking, _sub rosa,_ in a secluded corner of the library, which was furnished in a sombre and solid fashion. In the Floyd family the household divinity was the lace-curtain, whose susceptibility to offence from the fumes of tobacco is well known; her high-priestess was Mrs. Floyd, and her chief victim was Walworth. Associated with the two smokers was young Freddy Pratt, whose solicitude regarding Brainard's mental state on the occasion of his daughter's call at the bank has been already touched upon, and who was now puffing a cigarette with a learned and expert air. This attitude was displeasing to Ogden, who was perhaps over-disposed to feel official differences on social occasions; but no oppressive sense of his own subordinate rank troubled Freddy Pratt, who had but a feeble and intermittent realization of the orders of the business hierarchy, or indeed of anything else.

"It was a matter that concerned just her and him," Fairchild was saying as Ogden entered, with a contemplative regard fastened on the lengthening ash of his cigar. "It was nobody else's business."

He stopped. He had spoken in a low, quiet voice, but he had conveyed unmistakably the presence of quotation-marks.

"I called on 'em the other night," volunteered Freddy Pratt, unabashedly. His perky little nose was tipped in the air, and his eyes were closed to the two fine slits that denote the complete enjoyment of the smoker. "I wasn't going to stand off. They're at the Northumberland--big name, but not much else. Ragged matting in the halls, and the janitor didn't look very slick. I guess they've rented ready furnished. Mayme was real glad to see me. But _he_ was rather grumpy, I thought."

"Everybody ought always to be glad to see _you_, Freddy," smiled Walworth, with a caressing irony.

"I suppose," resumed Fairchild, thoughtfully, "that the human family will always go on considering a wedding as a joyous occasion. It always has; it always must--hope springs eternal."

Ogden wondered what other view there might be to take. Everybody had seemed lively and happy enough when Kittie was married.

"But there's the other side--the side that turns to view with a consideration of the complicated relations of a good many new and diverse elements--new people coming in. We had a case in our own family some years ago, when my young cousin married. Poor Lizzie; she is dead now. Her father died six months before her and left a good deal to be divided up. Her husband was trustee for the boy after she herself went, and he made us a good deal of trouble. He had his eye on the estate from the start, and more than his share in the handling of it. There were a good many meetings in lawyers' offices--more trying than the courts themselves. There was a good deal of money lost, and there is a good deal of feeling that will never be got over. He traded on his wife's memory all through. Yet the family welcomed him very cordially and trustfully; we thought the poor girl was going to be so happy. She was; she never knew."

Ogden sighed; this was dismal matter.

"Oh, well," continued Fairchild, resuming his cigar, with an air of passing to lighter topics, "this can't apply here. All of us are happily married or are going to be--"

Freddy Pratt nonchalantly blew an ineffable smoke-ring across the room; Walworth slipped around the table to close the last inch of crack in the door.

"Oh, dear, yes!" he exclaimed.

"--and none of us are being troubled through relations by marriage."

The door was shut, but the penetrating voice of Ann Wilde came through it clearly, and Walworth winced.

"Oh, dear, no!" he protested.

"I should say not," chimed in Freddy Pratt, with his self-satisfied little ba-a.

The cigars were ending. "Come, let us go out to the others," said Floyd.

In the drawing-room Ogden presently encountered Jessie Bradley and her parents. The girl herself appeared as dressed as the occasion could warrant, but her father and mother wore the every-day habiliments in which he had first seen them, a fortnight before, on the occasion of a call at Hinsdale. They had an easy-going aspect, as if they hardly cared to put themselves out greatly. They were present in the triple capacity of relatives of the hostess, of suburbanites, and of body-guard to escort their daughter back home after another of her frequent visits in town, and their effect was quite provisional and transitory.

Mrs. Bradley was a pleasant woman whose face was full of the fine lines of experience and whose hair had thinned greatly without changing its dry, sandy brown. She wore an old-fashioned tortoise-shell comb. She met Ogden here precisely as she had met him in her own house. He noticed presently that she treated everybody else in exactly the same fashion, and he learned subsequently that she had, practically, one invariable manner for all times, places, and people. It was a manner that he found very quiet, simple, straightforward, and friendly. It showed that she valued herself, and was also disposed to accord a good value to anybody else. It seemed to say, as plainly as words: "The Lord is the maker of us all; so let's have no more fuss about it." It was the good American manner in full bloom.

Her husband had a jovial eye, a grizzled moustache, a rotund, polished forehead, and cheeks that hung downward fatly into his big, round, short neck. He appeared to have valued his peace of mind sufficiently to preserve it and to be satisfied with the moderate success that comes from moderate effort. He wore a short-waisted, double-breasted frock coat, and there were no wrinkles in it, either front or back: he would have found it impossible to thrust his plump hand in between any two of the buttons.

He was given in the directory as "Bradley, Danl. H., secty. and treas. Darrell & Bradley P't'g & Lith'g Co." He had been one of the organizers of the corporation, but had since yielded the lead to others of more push and means. He had a moderate salary and a small block of the stock. Since he was assisting the business as an officer, rather than directing it as an individual, he had little personal annoyance from typographical unions and from the paper manufacturers' trusts. As for "pi" and proof-readers' errors, matters which have a power to make some men agonize, he merely laughed at them. The concern, besides its central establishment, had a few retail branches placed here and there through the business district; one of them, on the ground floor of the Clifton, supplied the La Salle Street banks and insurance offices with ledgers, ink, and blotting-pads.

He had an acre of ground and a two-story frame house at Hinsdale, and Ogden remembered the small green-house where he fed his craze for chrysanthemums.

"We have come to take our girl back home," he said to Ogden as he laid his plump hand lightly on his daughter's shoulder. "That is, if she can make up her mind to go with us."

"Just us two all alone in the house," added her mother, with a humorous pathos. "No chick nor child."

Jessie laughed and shook out a bit of her frivolous finery. Her face had a tired look, but motion seemed more restful to her than rest itself.

Ogden canvassed the three. Whence could this girl have got her supple leanness, her light, gay, rapid, incisive air, her aspen-like quiverings of nervous force? Not from her parents. From the March winds, perhaps, that sweep down from Mackinaw, over the limy and choppy expanse of Lake Michigan; from the varied breezes, hot and cold, that scour the prairies on their way from scorched-up Texas or from the snow-fields beyond Manitoba.

"Not even a relative," pursued her father; "not one in all the country round--except Frances. All our people are down East," he continued, addressing Ogden more directly. "They write every so often to learn if we are millionnaires yet. We always have to say 'no,' and that discourages them. They stay where they are."

"But Jessie goes around to look after them," contributed her mother, with combined complacency and reproach. "She goes to Pittsfield and Nantucket and everywhere. People are beginning, now, to ask her up to Wisconsin, summers. And sometimes Florida."

The girl shrugged her shoulders in a fidgety fashion.

"Oh, well, mamma," she said, "I have to circulate. Let's circulate some now," she suggested, turning to Ogden. "I'll be ready to go when you are," she called back to her father.