Part 12

The particular institution in which Ann was interested bore some external resemblance to its great prototype across the street. It was smaller and, if possible, uglier; but it, too, had its quadrangular arcade, its big square skylight, its ladies' gallery. In this gallery Ann sat daily for several hours, along with other women of a like turn of mind, and kept an eye on the proceedings generally. After a few sessions she became accustomed to the mere externals of the place--the endless shuffle of feet on the grimy floor, the sharp yawps of raw and eager voices, the flinging aloft of excited arms, the little tangles of noise and passion that were instantly woven around every new-comer with, an offer to buy or to sell. She looked over this choppy sea across to the promised land that was being portrayed on the opposite blackboard; the artist paced to and fro on a long, high, narrow platform, and worked in the uncertainty of a single drop-light. He frequently changed his mind, and his alterations usually had a deep and sometimes a discouraging effect upon Ann and her associates. Every now and then one would retire into the hallway and consult with her agent, and then there would be the rustle of greenbacks, and the agent would take the elevator down and presently be seen among the crowd of men on the floor. The agent was likely to be a gallant fellow, only too happy to be of service to a lady.

Ann was now a member of Floyd's household, in good and regular standing. She felt herself very much at home. What was her brother-in-law's was her sister's, and what was her sister's was hers. She was usually the first to unfold the morning paper; she pre-empted the bathroom with little regard to Walworth's established habits; and if the idea of some trifling delicacy occurred to her she would order it from the grocery, and after it had appeared on Walworth's table it appeared again in his bill. She did not stand on ceremony; she waived all stiff formality; cosily and frankly she was quite one of the family.

As such, she used Walworth's office quite freely, and in the same capacity she joined in the conferences which the Floyds were now beginning to hold with Atwater up under his great skylight in the roof. Atwater's little house for Claudia had given great satisfaction, and he was now about to do a larger one for Claudia's parents, who had begun to look upon their banishment to the West as a perpetual fact. Claudia's house had been delivered with its stairs, its windows, its red chimney, and its chandeliers--which last were composed by a pushing young draughtsman who was as anxious to make interest with Atwater as Atwater had perhaps been to make interest with Floyd.

Atwater was accustomed to people who didn't know their own minds, to people who knew their own minds too well, to people who had too many minds to really have any mind at all, and to people who had so much money that they didn't need to have any mind. He was impeccably suave and unruffled, but he had the immense advantage of being able to impress the unduly brusque and capricious and exasperating among his clients with the fact that they were dealing with a gentleman and an artist. He also put a good deal of "presence" into the rendering and the collecting of his accounts; there was no more disputing his charges than his taste.

He took equally, with his urbane imperturbability, the anxious carpings of Mrs. Floyd and the easy joking of her husband. Ann he quietly ignored, and Walworth thanked him; for his sister-in-law's interest in the new house was becoming oppressively personal. As for Claudia, he always saw that she had, out of his sample cabinet, all the bits of tiling and scraps of marqueterie that she needed; and if she fancied a promenade among the boards and trestles of his drawing-room, her whim was gratified. Ogden and Jessie, who sometimes came too, he welcomed pleasantly--the guests of the present were the clients of the future. Ogden admired his beautiful manners and his whitened hair; one day he amusedly recalled Jessie's determination to make her husband's hair like it.

He looked at Atwater, who was explaining his preliminary sketches to the Floyds and was trying to fix the general bearings of hall, stairway, and closets; his hair looked whiter still under the diffused glare from the skylight.

George turned to Jessie, with his hand on his own head, so smooth and shining brown.

"This is the hair you are to whiten," he said, and he lifted his eyebrows in a smile.

"I never saw such a boy!" she murmured in a repressed ecstasy. "Do you remember _everything_ I have said?" No one was looking, and she placed her own hand on his other temple.

"Wouldn't powder do?" he asked lightly.

"Only for girls."

"Couldn't it be bleached?"

"Not and get that color."

"Must I suffer, then?"--with his hand still on his brow.

"I'm afraid that's the only way." She lowered his hand in her own, and gave it a tender pressure on its descent.

"Must it be lingering, or something sharp and sudden?"

She pressed his hand again, and looked affectionately into his eyes. "Both, perhaps."

"Will it be fear or anxiety or shame?"

"Wait and see."

Atwater rolled up his sketches and threw them into a drawer. Then he went to his cabinet and took out a few small strips and squares of encaustic tiling in yellow and gray.

"And now I wonder if our little Colleen wouldn't like to take some of these home to play with." He turned courteously to Mrs. Floyd, while his hand reached out for a sheet of brown paper.

"They're not too--too heavy?" she asked, cautiously. "Nor too easily broken?"

The child opened wide her brown eyes, in one of her sober little ecstasies. "Oh, plaze, mamma! Oh, lave me have them--do!"

Ogden turned to Jessie, mutely asking her to share his appreciation of this. But she did not seem, especially amused. He remembered, then, that to himself he had frequently called her treatment of Claudia "uneven." Sometimes the child entertained her, sometimes she annoyed her. Jessie seemed to regard her--and he felt now and then that she so regarded children generally--as a doll to be played with until weariness came, and then to be carelessly thrust away.

"Oh, let her have 'em," said Ann, with an air of authority.

"_Very good_ of you, I'm sure," said Floyd to Atwater.

"Not at all; I'm sampled to death. There, my child." He gave her a neat little package. "I'm sure they'll understand you when you get to Paris!"

XVII

George Ogden and Jessie Bradley were married during the third week in October. The wedding took place at St. Asaph's, with the participation of a small section of the choir, and the Floyds opened their house for the reception that followed. Walworth even gave George a small lunch at his club.

For some weeks previous Ogden had watched for the right opportunity to make a formal announcement of his plans to the head of the bank and to ask for a week's leave. For nearly a month, now, Brainard had not looked at him, had not spoken to him; and when he entered the old man's office to make his request Brainard still refrained from looking at him, and in speaking to him was as curt as possible.

"We need all our men right here; you must give up any idea of going off."

"Blow hot, blow cold," thought George, and asked Jessie what she preferred to do under the circumstances.

She had planned a long and rapid and lavish tour, and the tears of disappointment started to her eyes.

"Go anyway," she cried.

"Go? Do you know what he is?" And "Do you know what business is?" he almost added.

She lapsed into a sullen silence.

"We could arrange the wedding for a Saturday," he suggested, "and spend Sunday in Wisconsin."

This proposition stuck in her throat, but presently she gulped it down. "Only don't call it a wedding-trip," she said tartly. "Well," she went on, "we'll settle that. We must, because the cards have got to be started out pretty soon--all those people who have entertained me have got to be remembered. There's some in Providence, and in Detroit, and in St. Paul. And don't let me forget those Louisville people that took me to Old Point."

They spent their Sunday in Oconomowoc, along with the Seven Bridegrooms. The day was wet and gloomy, and most of the time they sat in-doors over a grate-fire. Mists dulled the blazing red of the maples, and a thick fall of leaves was churned into the mud before the house by the wheels of farm wagons returning home from church. Only at sunset did the clouds clear away, and the full moon rose over one lake while the sun sank below the other.

George recalled this many times in afteryears.

They had taken a house in Walton Place for the year and a half from November first. The house had been vacant some little time, and the landlord made no account of an introductory fortnight.

Mrs. Bradley had come in from Hinsdale and had superintended most of the furnishing and fitting up. She saw the window-shades put into place and told the men where to set the refrigerator, and Jessie had looked on with the gay irresponsibility of a child who watches puppets being strung.

On their return from Wisconsin they found the house decorated almost throughout with chrysanthemums. The new green-house at Hinsdale had devoted the whole autumn to this specialty.

Jessie sank down into one of her big new easy-chairs. "Nothing to do but to be happy," she sighed, with a long and delicious expiration.

She had her days, but those dates were of course overridden by her intimates.

Among the first to call were the Floyds. Walworth came over with a pocketful of cigars--to christen the new wall-paper, he said.

"Have you got any closets?" was one of his questions.

"Plenty," replied George.

"Then I don't see but what you're all right--just as well off in a house that you rent as we are going to be in a house made to order. If ever I turn architect"--with a glance towards his wife--"I shall begin every house with a dozen closets and then pour in the various rooms around them. Four drawers in every one, and two rows of hooks. How stuff does accumulate!"

"Yes, the inside is rather nice," Jessie acknowledged; "but the outside might be improved. I have my own notion about the porch and the front door."

George turned to her, as if to ask what that notion might be.

Other friends followed--Brower among them.

He went about rather shyly, looking at the draperies and _grilles_ and mirrors. In the semi-gloom of the dining-room he threw his arm over Ogden's shoulder and looked into his eye with a friendly and affectionate smile.

"I never expected you to do it," he said. "You have left me as lonesome as the deuce."

"Ho it? Why not?"

"Because you're so careful; you always think things out--regular old Puritan sage."

"Oh, well," began George, with the air proper to a launching out into a broad and easy generalization, "aren't we New England Puritans the cream of the Anglo-Saxon race? And why does the Anglo-Saxon race rule the globe except because the individual Anglo-Saxon can rule himself?"

"Oh, I know," said Brower, discontentedly; "that's all right, up to a certain point."

Others came, among them the Valentines.

"And how do you like your new house?" asked Mrs. Valentine, effusively. She addressed Jessie exclusively; with her everything went in the female line. "We are new converts too, you know--just over from the West Side. We are very much pleased, aren't we, Adrian?"

Her husband gave his corroborative little bow. "We were being left rather aside, over there," he admitted. "And take the South Side, for that matter. Business is walking right over them, and the whole section is in a state of mild panic from the Courts to Oakwood Boulevard. Yes, we're safe and quiet, and settled to stay." Still others came, among them Cornelia Tillinghast Brainard. She called frequently, she usually brought her husband with her, and she never failed to walk him all around the Ogdens' neighborhood. Her favorite time was Sunday afternoon; then she took him along the Lake Shore Drive and through all the adjacent streets, with the full benefit of daylight.

Cornelia now had command over a good seven hundred thousand dollars, and she was arming for the social fray. She meant to bang her shield against the shields of other amazons. The gladiator must come to the arena, and the centre of the arena seemed to be somewhere near the water-works tower. If Burton was going to put seventy or eighty thousand dollars into a house, the site of it must not be too far away from this point.

"I expect I shall cut a pretty wide swath," Cornelia acknowledged to herself.

Jessie had her receptions through November; her intimates appeared at these as well, and so did many of her more formal acquaintances.

On one of these occasions George, having left the bank early, after a light day, hurried home, dressed himself, and hastened down to the parlor. Its contracted space was beflowered and belighted, and quite a little throng of ladies were circulating and chatting there. Mrs. Floyd and Miss Wilde were among them; so were Mrs. Ogden and Kittie; so were Mrs. Valentine and Mrs. Atwater.

His wife hurried up to him; her cheeks were flushed and her large eyes burned brightly.

"If you had only been three minutes sooner! She has just gone. She was telling me why she hadn't been able to come to the wedding. I wanted you to meet her so much."

"Who is this?"

"Cecilia Ingles."

"There is such a person, then?"

"Why, George, what do you mean? Of course there is, and she was just as nice to me as she could be."

"Why shouldn't she have been? I see you call her Cecilia. Are you as intimate as that?"

"Everybody calls her Cecilia. See, Mrs. Atwater is trying to catch your eye."

A tall and rather stately woman of thirty-five was standing in the doorway; she seemed finished--in profile, figure, and carriage. "How well it's done," she said to him; "who is the presiding genius?"

"My wife's mother, I fancy." He turned and drew her attention to the rustling of Mrs. Bradley's black silk.

"Ah!" she said indifferently, and turned away.

He had been unable to apprehend the simple costliness of his questioner's dress, and he only half wondered how, in a dozen quiet words, she had conveyed the impression of an expert addressing a beginner; but he could not refrain from asking himself if there was a slight here on Mrs. Bradley. He looked at the old lady again. She was moving about with the greatest show of confidence and good-will. No thought of anything called "differences" had entered her head. She did not believe that anybody would want to slight her or that anybody could. She had come on the ground in the early days of simple friendliness, and perhaps she was too old to apprehend that anything different had developed in the meanwhile. She certainly seemed to need no defence, and George was assuredly in no position to offer any.

"Cecilia has gone off and left me," Mrs. Atwater resumed; "careless girl!" They were half-sisters, and Mrs. Atwater was several years the elder. The Atwaters and the Ingleses ran as a kind of four-in-hand. The rich sister had married a poor man, and the poor sister had married a rich man, and they all went along at the same pace. It was a somewhat rapid pace. "I'm going to see what Mrs. Floyd can do for me; I dare say she has a spare seat."

His wife caught at Mrs. Atwater and bade her adieu with effusion. Did Jessie regard it as a feat and a triumph to have secured her presence? So it seemed to Jessie's husband.

The last of these little receptions was disposed of, and the honeymoon drew to its close. Quiet succeeded this introductory flurry to married life, and George now took occasion to lay a steady hand upon the throbbings of the "pocket-nerve."

His apprehension of any suffering in this part of his financial anatomy was, indeed, largely anticipatory; it was not that the nerve had been roughly touched, but that it soon might be. He had no tendency towards a retrospective study of the journal-and-ledger aspects of his courtship. He had been spared the expense of the wedding-journey that Jessie had planned by the unaccountable countable veto of Brainard. And the remuneration of St. Asaph's choir and kindred matters had fallen to his wife's father to arrange. But, all the same, many small indications arose to make it worth while for him to remember that he was a young man on a moderate salary and that most of his available means were badly tied up.

He noticed that his wife was developing a disdain of the public conveyances; a carriage was sometimes required of afternoons, and invariably of evenings when dances or theatre-going might be the matter in hand. She was also cultivating her taste for flowers; she had employed them rather lavishly at her receptions (in conjunction with her mandolin-players), and her appreciation of them kept equal pace with the advancing coldness of the weather and their own advancing cost. She also betrayed a ravenous taste for the exasperating superfluities of house-furnishing, and his bills for things needful were attended by a train of little accounts for things quite worse than useless.

"Oh, well, we shall be fitted out pretty soon," he sighed; and he saw his studious face reflected from among the cluttered _bibelots_ of his mantelpiece.

The point of completion as regarded the interior was finally reached, and his wife's intentions as to the exterior presently developed. She accompanied him out into the vestibule one morning, and stood at the head of the steps to bid him good-by.

"These doors are awfully shabby and old-fashioned," she declared. "Don't you suppose the landlord would put in new ones?"

"I'm quite sure he wouldn't. I wouldn't in his place."

"Well, we have taken this house for a year and a half, and are likely to take it again for a year or two longer. Why couldn't we fix things up ourselves? The entrance counts more, really, than anything else."

"That might be thought about."

"Yes, indeed. If Mary Munson is coming to see me, I want things as nice as they have everything."

Mary Munson was of the Louisville family that had entertained Jessie Bradley at Old Point Comfort. It presently transpired that she was under like obligations to many other acquaintances of her girlhood.

"I must pay them up," she explained. "Besides, I need company--all alone here during the day, and mamma away off there in the country."

The succession of Mary Munsons lasted, indeed, through into spring. Blowers, carriages, and matinee-tickets doubled up finely, and the hideous mien of the caterer was seen in connection with frequent lunches.

"I spoke to Mr. Atwater to-day about the front of the house," she said to him one evening towards the close of dinner. "Maggie didn't quite get around to pudding to-day," she went on, as the dessert came in, "so I sent out for this ice-cream. Take some of these lady-fingers with it."

"To Atwater?"

"Yes. Frances wanted me to go up with her and see the drawings for the front of their house. It's going to be lovely. He had some special little drawings for the outside doors, and things like that. He's got beautiful taste."

"I know he has."

"I asked him to design some doors for us."

"You did?"

"Yes. He said he had a new idea that he'd like to try."

"You must get your landlord to pass on that. He might not like the new idea."

"Think not?"

"He might object. It would all come on his hands in the end."

"We'd better go on with it, don't you think?"

"But don't let it be anything too unusual or too elaborate." Architects, he understood, generally charged a commission on the cost of the work; so much per cent.--five, he had heard. "We don't want to go in too deep."

They left the table and sauntered slowly into the parlor--the drawing-room, Jessie called it. The standing lamp sent out a broad glare from under its shade of crinkled yellow paper, and the floor of the room burned with a dull and unaccustomed red--the red of a handsome Turkish rug.

"Ah, what's this?" exclaimed George.

"I picked it up to-day," she said; "it was so pretty and just the thing for this room. Cecilia called it a great bargain--she knows all about rugs."

"Then you have been shopping with Mrs. Ingles?"

"Well, she was getting a few things. She said that sixty dollars was little enough for it."

"Sixty dollars! Did you pay for it?"

"I had it charged."

"Charged?"

"Yes; wasn't that right? Why, George, even poor mamma, away out there in Hinsdale, has her account at Field's."

XVIII

The drawings for the embellishment of the house on Walton Place were undertaken by Atwater, and their scope broadened under the artist's hands. George, at his wife's request, took the elevator one noon and went up to the roof to see them.

In Atwater's absence he was received by the head draughtsman. The scheme had widened, as such schemes will; there were suggestions for the porch and for new hand--rails. There was also a drawing for a cornice in harmony.

"Urn," said George, thoughtfully. "This is all very handsome."

At about the same time that work on the Ogden house began, the work on the plans for the Floyd house received a check. This check was due to the first Western trip of Winthrop C. Floyd, treasurer of the Massachusetts Brass Company. He came on a general visit of inspection.

The morning after his arrival he sat in the office of the Chicago branch; he had come down with Mrs. Floyd and Claudia. His keen and quiet eye ran over the furnishings of the place. He was a bachelor of forty; he was dressed simply but elegantly--he was completely _comme il faut_, except for his muddy shoes, which seemed to trouble him.

"Well, Walworth," he said, with the manner of an elder brother and of an official whose dictum had weight, "you are pretty well fixed up out here--better than the home office, in fact."

"Have to be," returned the other. "Down East everybody knows the company; you could do business in a coal-shed if you wanted to. Here it's different. People don't know us from a hole in the ground; they go by what they see."

"Do you use all these calls and things?"

The wall was set with electrical devices for calling boys from everywhere for everything.

"Sometimes. Anyway it looks as if we did, and that helps business."

Little Claudia came creeping up to his desk.

"When are you going to begin, papa? I've come down to see you do it."

"Do what, my dear?"

"Make money. You said you did it here. When are you going to begin?"

Winthrop swung his chair towards the window and looked out at the driving rain and at the crowds of vehicles and passengers in the filthy streets below.

"Yes," he said, under his breath; "when are you going to begin?" Then aloud, "What a beastly hole! Is there no government here?"

"Precious little for a million and a half of people, and precious bad what there is."

"A million and a half? Nonsense!"

"Why nonsense? There's the census, and there's the regular annual increase."

Winthrop favored his brother with a stare of frank curiosity. Walworth had spoken with some warmth; he seemed disposed to throw an undue ardor into his defence of his adopted home--a city where quality seemed to count for less than quantity, and where the "prominent" citizen made the "eminent" citizen a superfluity. Then, too, Winthrop coupled with the earnest lines in his brother's forehead a slightly dingy necktie under his brother's chin. He observed, moreover, in the polishing of the shoe which Walworth, for greater emphasis, was beating on the carpet, a neglect of the heel in favor of the toe. And there were several other indications of a growing carelessness in dress.

"Well, Walworth," he remarked, "you are getting acclimated, I guess."