Part 8

"Oh, yes; no one could be unfriendly with her--that is, she's an inoffensive, good-hearted old woman. But--well, we see very little of her; she's not a blood-relative, you know."

"But surely, if you are not at daggers' points with her, you would send your father's widow an announcement of your wedding!"

"But--we don't think very much of her, Margaret; we're not, just to say, intimate with her."

"You say, though, that she is 'inoffensive and good-hearted,' and she was your father's wife?" repeated Margaret, looking mystified.

"Oh, well," Daniel gave in, "I'll add her name if you think I--I ought to. She'll be so pleased; she'll tell it all over the township! I mean"--he pulled himself up--"well, you see, she's old and no use to any one and I'm afraid she's going to be, after a while, something of a burden to us all."

Margaret remained silent, as Daniel took a pencil from his vest-pocket and scribbled at the end of his wedding list.

"There," he said, handing the paper back to her. "Anything to please you, my dear!"

"Daniel?"

"Well, dearest?"

"I don't like the way you speak of that old lady."

"But haven't I consented to send cards to her, Margaret?"

"Yes. And I'm sure that a man who loves children as you do, who gives money to charities and the church, as you tell me you do, couldn't be thoughtless of the aged. I don't want to believe you could."

"No, indeed! I gave one hundred dollars last year to our U. B. Church Home for Old Ladies." He drew out his purse, extracted a newspaper clipping, and passed it to her, "My name heads the list, you see."

"Oh, Daniel, and you were going to neglect to send an announcement of your wedding to the 'aged, inoffensive, kind-hearted, but useless and burdensome' widow of your father!"

"But, Margaret," he protested, his self-esteem wincing at her disapproval, "if ever you see her, you'll not blame me! You'll understand. Anyway, family sentiment among you Southerners is so much stronger, I've always been told, than with us in the North."

"I'm sure it must be."

"My step-mother is too poor, too, to send us a wedding present," he added as a mitigating reason for his "neglect."

Margaret, having no conception of his penuriousness (he seemed so lavishly generous to her), took such speeches as this for a childish simplicity, the eccentricity of legal genius, perhaps. Had she known that he actually felt it wasteful to invest an expensively engraved card and a stamp where there would be no return of any kind, she would have advised him to consult an alienist.

Little did she and Daniel dream that the sending of that wedding announcement to old Mrs. Leitzel of Martz Township was going to make history for the entire Leitzel family.

X

The marriage of Daniel Leitzel took place in the fall, and during all the following winter New Munich kept up its lively interest in the bride, and discussed freely and constantly her personality, looks, manner, clothes, opinions, and, most impressive of all, her unique style of speech on occasions; it also speculated boldly and with the keenest curiosity as to how she "got on" with Danny and her "in-laws."

As the _Weekly Intelligencer_ had predicted, many "social events" celebrated the marriage. To entertain the bride and groom came to be such a social distinction that people vied with each other in the extravagant elaborateness of their parties; and not to have met Mrs. Leitzel proved one to be socially obscure.

To the men of New Munich it was a "seven days' wonder" that a woman of such charm and distinction should have "tied up" with a man like Dan.

"How did a weasel like Dan Leitzel ever put it over a girl like _that_? Why, he's at least twice her age!"

But the women, noting that the bride's clothes with the exception of her two evening gowns, however graceful and becoming, were home-made, and that though the lace on some of them was real and rare, it was very old, did not wonder so much at the marriage.

"She is certainly making a hit with New Munich," was the verdict at first. "Isn't she the very dearest thing that ever happened?"

Margaret's amiable, sympathetic manner, her simplicity, her occasional drollery, the distinction of her fine breeding, fascinated these people of a different tradition and fibre.

"No wonder Danny Leitzel looks like another man!" his acquaintances commented. "Why, he's taking on flesh! He looks ten years younger! Do you notice how spryly he walks? And how radiantly he beams on everybody, the old skinflint! Yes, he certainly had his usual luck when he got that young wife of his!"

It was another cause for wonder and widespread comment that the maiden sisters, too, looked brighter and younger since the advent of their brother's bride.

"They're awfully proud of her and of the fuss being made over her and Danny! Who would have dreamed that Miss Jennie and Miss Sadie could get on peaceably with their brother's wife, living in the same house with her! It seems unbelievable."

"Oh, wait! She's a new thing just now, but wait! We shall presently see and hear--what we shall see and hear! If they get on peaceably, I'll warrant it's not because Miss Jennie and Miss Sadie are angels. It's Mrs. Danny that's so awfully easy-going they can't quarrel with her. But of course it can't possibly last. If she is easy-going, she isn't a jelly-fish. They're bound to clash after a while. You'll see what you'll see!"

"Even the bride herself looks happy," one maiden pensively remarked. "I shouldn't think she would. _I_ couldn't have married Dan Leitzel."

"You don't know what you might have done _if tempted_," a friend of the maiden pointedly suggested.

"But she seems to be devoted to Danny. She really acts so."

"Oh, that's just her Southern warmth of manner. Don't take _that_ seriously. As if a stunning girl like that could be in love with _him_!"

"But I heard she was poor and dependent and that Danny's devotion and goodness to her made her just adore him! An old man's darling, you know!"

There were only one or two people who, more observant than communicative, noted that Mrs. Leitzel, though lazily good-humoured and apparently happy, had a strained expression in her large, soft eyes, a veiled, elusive look of trouble, almost of suffering.

Meantime, the people of New Munich were not more astonished than were Daniel's sisters themselves at the relation which they found themselves sustaining toward his wife. It had taken only a few days of association with Margaret to disarm them of their stiffness, suspicion, and jealousy of their brother's devotion to her. They found her so surprisingly willing to take second place in her husband's house, so disinclined to usurp any of the prerogatives which they had so long enjoyed (and which they knew most people would think should now be hers) that in spite of many things about her which they could not understand or approve, they presently succumbed to the subtle spell of her magnetism and her docility and became almost as enthusiastic about her as was Danny himself.

Long and earnest were the discussions they held in secret over her.

"Her clothes are so plain," lamented Sadie. "You could hardly call 'em such a trussoo, could you? All she's got is just her travelling suit with two silk waists, two house dresses, one afternoon dress, and two evening dresses. And her underclothes ain't fancy like a bride's. When I asked her to show me her wedding underclothes, she said she didn't get any new, she hadn't needed any! To be sure, what she has got is awful fine linen and hand embroidered, but it ain't made a bit fancy and no coloured ribbons at. All plain white," said Sadie in a tone of keen disappointment.

"And her evening dresses," said Jennie; "she says the lace on 'em she 'inherited.' Putting old second-hand lace on your wedding outfit yet! I told her I'd anyhow think she'd buy new for her wedding outfit. And she said, 'But I couldn't afford to buy lace like this. My great-grandmother wore this lace on a ball gown.'"

"She ain't ashamed to say right out she can't afford this and that," said Sadie wonderingly.

"Well, to be sure, that's just to us, and we're her folks now. She'd know better than to say it outside."

"Well, I guess anyhow _then_!" Sadie fervently hoped.

"But it looks as if she didn't _have_ much, don't it?"

"I'm afraid it does." Sadie shook her head.

"What I want to know is, did she or didn't she bring Danny _any_thing?" Jennie worried.

"It's hard to say," sighed Sadie.

"I don't like to ask her right out, just yet anyhow. After a while I will mebby," said Jennie.

"She's wonderful genteel, the most genteel lady I ever saw," remarked Sadie. "And how she speaks her words so pretty! _Buttah_ for butter; and _haose_ for house. It sounds grand, don't it?"

"It's awful high-toned," Jennie granted. "I wonder what Hiram's Lizzie will have to say when she sees her once. Won't Lizzie look common anyhow, alongside of her?"

"Well, I guess!"

"Hiram will have more jealous feelings than ever when he sees what a genteel lady Danny picked out; ain't?"

"Yes, anyhow!"

"And that makes something, too, being high-toned that way; it makes near as much as money," said Jennie thoughtfully.

"Still, I don't believe Danny would have married her if she hadn't anything," Sadie speculated.

"Well, I guess not, too, mebby. I _hope_ not. It's next Sabbath we're invited to Millerstown to spend the day at Hiram's, you mind?" she told Sadie; "if only you don't take the cold or have the headache," she added, insisting always upon regarding Sadie as an invalid to be coddled.

"You know, Jennie, Danny always says he has so ashamed for our Hiram's common table manners. I guess he won't like it, either, before Margaret that Hiram eats so common, for all he's a minister."

"Yes, well, but supposing she met _Mom_ by chance, what would she think? Danny better consider of _that_ before he worries over our Hiram."

"Yes, I guess, too," Sadie agreed.

Meantime, Margaret, during these first months after her marriage, was living through a succession of spiritual upheavals and epochs which, under a calm and even phlegmatic exterior, were completely hidden from those about her.

Her earliest impressions in her new and strange environment at the Leitzels' home in New Munich were confused and bewildering; for so isolated and narrow had her life hitherto been, that vulgarity in any form had never, up to this time, touched or come nigh her, and she did not understand it, did not know how to meet or cope with it.

But the second stage of her experience, as the situation became less confused, more definite, was, in spite of Daniel's devotion to her, for which she was grateful, a transitory sense of humiliation, of mortification, that she had married into a family that was "straight-out common"--she, a Berkeley. It was probably the first time in her life that she had ever given a thought to the fact that she was a Berkeley. But since to a Southerner of good family, to be well-born was a detail of inestimable importance, she had naturally assumed that any man whom Walter brought into his home and presented to her and Hattie must be worthy of that honour. It was on this assumption that so many of Daniel's peculiarities had failed to mean to her what she could now see they meant--sheer commonness. Why had Walter taken it for granted so easily that because a man was a successful and prominent lawyer he was a gentleman? Yes, her own sister's husband had let her go so far as to _marry_ into a family of whom he knew either too little or too much!

"I trusted Walter so entirely, I didn't even think of questioning him on such a matter!" she reflected with some bitterness upon his willingness to sacrifice her in order to preserve the peace of his own home.

"There are two kinds of lower class people, common people and people who are only just plain," she philosophized. "If Daniel's family were just plain, I could take them to my heart and be glad for the broadening experience of knowing and loving them. I could get over my prejudices about blood--I recognize that they _are_ prejudices--and I wouldn't even mind his sisters' peculiarities. But they are not just plain. They are---- Oh, my good Lord!" she almost moaned, covering her face with her hands.

However, all the experiences of Margaret's life had taught her, through very severe discipline, to accept philosophically whatever circumstances fell to her lot and to extract from alien conditions whatever of comfort could possibly be found in them. So, the third stage of the strenuous crisis through which she was passing was more cheerful. She found herself so interested in the novelty of the life and characters about her that it began to seem like the open page of an absorbing story. Indeed, so interested did she become, that for a time she forgot to think of it all in its relation to her own life. That phase was destined to be forced upon her later with added poignancy. But for the time being, even the fearfully vulgar taste of Daniel's house and its furnishings, the like of which she had never beheld, and Sadie's youthful _toilettes_--her empire gowns, middie blouses with Windsor ties, and hats with little velvet streamers down the back--served only to greatly entertain her.

"Sadie was always such a fancy dresser that way," Jennie would explain with pride. "Yes, she's a girl that's wonderful for dress."

Jennie's invariable reference to her younger sister as "a girl" seemed intended to carry out the idea of Sadie's sixteen-year-old style of dress.

"I suppose one couldn't make Sadie understand," thought Margaret, "that she'd be better dressed with one frock of good material, simply and suitably made, than with all that huge closet full of cheap trash."

But she was wise enough not to attempt reforms, or even suggestions, in any direction, in her new home.

In view of the fact that Daniel's sisters lived here dependent upon him, as Margaret supposed, Sadie's abundant finery seemed to her rather extravagant. "He's a very indulgent brother," she decided.

Walter's wedding gift to her had been a check for fifty dollars, which she was sure he must have borrowed on his life insurance. She was at present using this for pocket money. It was characteristic of her not to give one anxious thought to the time when it would all be spent. She was scarcely aware of the fact that the subject of money had never yet come up between her and Daniel, and she would have been amazed indeed to know how often her husband tried in vain to broach the topic which was to him of such paramount importance, and to her so negligible a detail in a life full of interests that had nothing to do with money.

The attitude of Daniel's sisters toward him seemed to Margaret not by any means the least of the curiosities of her new life: their obsequious admiration of him, their abject obedience to every least wish of his, their minute attention to his physical comforts and to the fussy details of his daily routine, from his morning bath up to his glass of hot milk at bedtime.

"And they've done this all his life! No wonder he's a----"

But she checked, even to her own consciousness, any admission of what she really thought he was.

Daniel, meantime, discovering through the many social affairs to which he took his bride that she was so greatly admired by the men of his world as to make them look upon him with envy (and to be looked upon with envy was sweet to his soul), opened up his heart and his purse to the extent of suggesting to his wife and his sisters that they celebrate his marriage and return the lavish hospitality that had been extended to them in New Munich by giving a large reception.

It was one Saturday afternoon as they all sat together in the "sitting-room" after their midday dinner, Daniel's offices being closed on Saturday afternoon to give his large staff of clerks a half holiday. Jennie had pushed Daniel's own easy-chair to the open fire for him, and he was lounging in it luxuriously.

"And I'm going to do it up in style. I'll have a caterer from Philadelphia," he announced, to the astonishment of his sisters.

"Oh, Danny, a caterer yet!" breathed Sadie, awestruck.

"It'll come awful high, Danny!" Jennie warned him.

"I know it will. I know that. But all the same I'm going to _do_ it!" responded Daniel heroically.

"Well," said Jennie, "I hope you'll tell the caterer, Danny, not to give us one of these lap-suppers the kind they had at Mrs. Congressman Ocksreider's, you mind. I like to sit up to a table when I eat. Mrs. Ocksreider's so stout, she hasn't _got_ a lap, and it looked awful inconvenient to her. Oh, it was _swell_ enough, to be sure, but you didn't get very full. We didn't overload our stomachs, I can tell you."

"We'll have small tables, then," Daniel agreed.

"Sadie," Jennie suddenly ordered her sister solicitously, "sit out of the window draft or you'll get the cold in your head yet."

Sadie obediently pulled her chair away from the window.

"I'm thirsty," Daniel announced; and at the word Jennie rose.

"I'll fetch you a drink, Danny."

In a moment she returned and stood by her brother's chair while he leisurely sipped the water she had brought him. This spectacle, a man's remaining seated while a woman stood, to which Margaret was becoming accustomed, had at first seemed to her quite awful.

"And you, Margaret," Daniel said as he sipped his water, "must have a new dress--gown, as you call it--for the party. You have worn those same two evening dresses of yours to about enough parties, I guess. Let Sadie help you choose a new one. And get something elegant and showy. I won't mind the cost. Sadie, you'll know what she ought to get; her own taste is too plain. I want her to do me credit!" he grinned, returning the empty glass to Jennie, who took it away.

"I'll help you pick out just the right thing," responded Sadie, eager for the orgy of planning a new evening costume, while Margaret, as she glanced at Sadie's ill-fitting, gay plaid blouse of cheap silk, made by a cheap seamstress, and at the coquettish patch of black court plaster off her left eye, concealed her amusement at her vision of herself in a garb of her sister-in-law's devising.

"Daniel," she suddenly said, wishing to divert the talk from clothes, and curious, also, to "try out" her husband on a certain point, "I'm thirsty."

Daniel, not yet very far recovered from the attentive lover stage, jumped up at once to get her a drink, quite as he would have done before their marriage, and Margaret smiled as she saw Jennie and Sadie look shocked at what she knew they felt to be her very unwifely attitude.

"My dears," she told them while Daniel was gone, "I've got to try to keep him in training, you spoil him so dreadfully."

"How high dare she go, Danny, for her new dress?" Sadie inquired when her brother returned with the water.

"Well, what do _you_ pay for a party dress?"

"My new white silk cost me sixteen-fifty."

"That's a showy, handsome dress all right. You may spend twenty dollars, Margaret," he said magnanimously.

"We'll go downtown right after breakfast on Monday morning, Margaret," said Sadie, "and pick out the goods and take it to Mrs. Snyder, my dressmaker. She charges five dollars to make a dress, but she gives you your money's worth; she makes them so nice and fancy. Your dresses ain't fussed up enough, Margaret."

Margaret wondered what would be the effect upon them if she told them that just the mere making of one of her "plain" gowns, by a good dressmaker, had cost nearly twice what Daniel "allowed" her for the goods, "findings," and making of a new one. But she decided to spare them the shock.

"Simple clothes suit me better," she said. "Unless I go to a high-priced dressmaker, I can do much better making my gowns myself."

"But I don't begrudge the high price, Margaret," urged Daniel; "you let Sadie's Mrs. Snyder make you a dress."

"Yes," said Jennie with decision, "you can't appear among our friends any more, Margaret, in such plain-looking dresses as you've been wearing. It would really give me a shamed face if you weren't so--well, even in plain clothes, you're awful aristocratic looking, and you'll look just grand in the dress Sadie's Mrs. Snyder will make you for five dollars."

Though Margaret was perfectly willing to take a subordinate place in her husband's household, she no more dreamed of his sisters interfering in her personal affairs than she thought of interfering with theirs, so in spite of Jennie's authoritative tone, she answered pleasantly: "Too bad you don't like my Mennonite taste, for you know, I'd love to adopt the 'plain' garb of these Mennonite women and girls one sees on the streets on market days. What could be more quaint and fetching than their spotless white caps on their glossy hair? Ah, I think they're a sly lot, these Mennonite girls. Don't tell me they don't know how bewitching they look in their unworldly garb intended to put down woman's natural vanity! So I won't get a new gown just now."

"Why not, when Danny offers you the money?" asked Sadie, astonished, while Jennie frowned disapprovingly.

"Here," said Daniel, taking a bank book and a fountain pen from his pocket, and rapidly making out a check, "you take this, Margaret, and let Sadie's Mrs. Snyder make you a nice party dress."

Margaret laughed a little as she took the check, feeling it useless to explain to them how impossible it would be to buy with twenty dollars, even at a bargain sale, anything so beautiful as her two gowns made by a skilled and artistic designer and trimmed with her great-grandmother's Brussels rose point.

Daniel looked chagrined and his sisters rather indignantly surprised that she did not thank him for the money. He thought he was being tremendously generous. But Margaret, inasmuch as they had been married two months and this was the first money he had offered her, received it as a matter of course; her husband had, at the altar, endowed her with his "worldly goods" and what was his was hers; that was her quite simple view of their financial relation.

"I don't want to spend this on a gown, Daniel," she said to the consternation of her hearers, as she tucked it into the bosom of her blouse, "for I don't need any; the ones I have are really all right, my dear; far better than anything I've seen on any woman in New Munich."

"But I gave it to you for a frock!" Daniel exclaimed, his eyes bulging. "I want you to have a fancy, dressy frock for our reception."

"My dear," Margaret patted his bald head, "you know a lot more about law than about a woman's frocks. You leave that to me."

Before he could reply, the one maid of the household entered the room, and presented a card-plate to Jennie.

"More callers--what a pile!" said Jennie as she took ten cards from the plate.

"Yes, and it's only one lady in the parlour settin'!" exclaimed the Pennsylvania Dutch maid. "It wonders me that she gives me so many tickets!"

"Well, would you look, Danny! If it ain't Miss Hamilton!" exclaimed Jennie with a contemptuous shrug. "Ain't she got nerve!"

"What! Well, well! Tut, tut, tut!--my stenographer calling on my wife! Yi, yi! Because she and her parents sent us a little bit of a vase for a wedding gift, she has the presumption to think she can make your acquaintance, my dear!"

"That exquisite little Venetian glass vase!" said Margaret eagerly. "It's one of the loveliest gifts we received."

"It looks as if it cost fifty cents," commented Jennie. "And they're not just to say poor either; her father is the high school principal and her mother's the Episcopal Church organist."

"But why ten cards," asked Daniel, "if she came by herself?"

"Her father's and mother's cards as well as her own; and for all of us," explained Margaret as she glanced over them.

"And is that the proper way to do?" asked Daniel, impressed.