THE CLIFF-DWELLERS

Between the former site of old Fort Dearborn and the present site of our newest Board of Trade there lies a restricted yet tumultuous territory through which, during the course of the last fifty years, the rushing streams of commerce have worn many a deep and rugged chasm. These great canons—conduits, in fact, for the leaping volume of an ever-increasing prosperity—cross each other with a sort of systematic rectangularity, and in deference to the practical directness of local requirements they are in general called simply—streets. Each of these canons is closed in by a long frontage of towering cliffs, and these soaring walls of brick and limestone and granite rise higher and higher with each succeeding year, according as the work of erosion at their bases goes onward—the work of that seething flood of carts, carriages, omnibuses, cabs, cars, messengers, shoppers, clerks, and capitalists, which surges with increasing violence for every passing day. This erosion, proceeding with a sort of fateful regularity, has come to be a matter of constant and growing interest. Means have been found to measure its progress—just as a scale has been arranged to measure the rising of the Nile or to gauge the draught of an ocean liner. In this case the unit of measurement is called the "story." Ten years ago the most rushing and irrepressible of the torrents which devastate Chicago had not worn its bed to a greater depth than that indicated seven of these "stories." This depth has since increased to eight—to ten—to fourteen—to sixteen, until some of the leading avenues of activity promise soon to become little more than mere obscure trails half lost between the bases of perpendicular precipices.

High above this architectural upheaval rise yet other structures in crag-like isolation. El Capitan is duplicated time and again both in bulk and in stature, and around him the floating spray of the Bridal Veil is woven by the breezes of lake and prairie from the warp of soot-flakes and the woof of damp-drenched smoke.

The explorer who has climbed to the shoulder of one of these great captains and has found one of the thinnest folds in the veil may readily make out the nature of the surrounding country. The rugged and erratic plateau of the Bad Lands lies before him in all its hideousness and impracticability. It is a wild tract full of sudden falls, unexpected rises, precipitous dislocations. The high and the low are met together. The big and the little alternate in a rapid and illogical succession. Its perilous trails are followed successfully by but few—by a lineman, perhaps, who is balanced on a cornice, by a roofer astride some dizzy gable, by a youth here and there whose early apprehension of the main chance and the multiplication table has stood him in good stead. This country is a treeless country—if we overlook the "forest of chimneys" comprised in a bird's-eye view of any great city, and if we are unable to detect any botanical analogies in the lofty articulated iron funnels whose ramifying cables reach out wherever they can, to fasten wherever they may. It is a shrubless country—if we give no heed to the gnarled carpentry of the awkward frame-works which carry the telegraph, and which are set askew on such dizzy corners as the course of the wires may compel. It is an arid country—if we overlook the numberless tanks that squat on the high angles of alley walls, or if we fail to see the little pools of tar and gravel that ooze and shimmer in the summer sun on the roofs of old-fashioned buildings of the humbler sort. It is an airless country—if by air we mean the mere combination of oxygen and nitrogen which is commonly indicated by that name. For here the medium of sight, sound, light, and life becomes largely carbonaceous, and the remoter peaks of this mighty yet unprepossessing landscape loom up grandly, but vaguely, through swathing mists of coal-smoke.

From such conditions as these—along with the Tacoma, the Monadnock, and a great host of other modern monsters—towers the Clifton. From the beer-hall in its basement to the barber-shop just under its roof the Clifton stands full eighteen stories tall. Its hundreds of windows glitter with multitudinous letterings in gold and in silver, and on summer afternoons its awnings flutter score on score in the tepid breezes that sometimes come up from Indiana. Four ladder-like constructions which rise skyward stage by stage promote the agility of the clambering hordes that swarm within it, and ten elevators—devices unknown to the real, aboriginal inhabitants—ameliorate the daily cliff-climbing for the frail of physique and the pressed for time.

The tribe inhabiting the Clifton is large and rather heterogeneous. All told, it numbers about four thousand souls. It includes bankers, capitalists, lawyers, "promoters"; brokers in bonds, stocks, pork, oil, mortgages; real-estate people and railroad people and insurance people—life, fire, marine, accident; a host of principals, agents, middlemen, clerks, cashiers, stenographers, and errand-boys; and the necessary force of engineers, janitors, scrub-women, and elevator-hands.

All these thousands gather daily around their own great camp-fire. This fire heats the four big boilers under the pavement of the court which lies just behind, and it sends aloft a vast plume of smoke to mingle with those of other like communities that are settled round about. These same thousands may also gather—in instalments—at their tribal feast, for the Clifton has its own lunch-counter just off one corner of the grand court, as well as a restaurant several floors higher up. The members of the tribe may also smoke the pipe of peace among themselves whenever so minded, for the Clifton has its own cigar-stand just within the principal entrance. Newspapers and periodicals, too, are sold at the same place. The warriors may also communicate their messages, hostile or friendly, to chiefs more or less remote; for there is a telegraph office in the corridor and a squad of messenger-boys in wait close by.

In a word, the Clifton aims to be complete within itself, and it will be unnecessary for us to go afield either far or frequently during the present simple succession of brief episodes in the lives of the Cliff-dwellers.

[I]

On the tenth floor of the Clifton is the office of the Massachusetts Brass Company.

Those whose minds are attuned to an appreciation of upholstery and kindred matters pronounce this little suite the gem of the whole establishment. Even many who are not adepts in the matter of house-furnishing, and who are much too rushed and preoccupied to become such, have been known to pause in their course through the Clifton's long corridors, on occasions when the ribbed glass door of the Brass Company happened to be standing ajar, and to say to themselves, with certain home offices in mind,

"Now, why can't our people do as much for us?"

Indeed, there is cause enough for envy in that small square of velvety Axminster, in the harmonious tinting of the walls, in the padded leather backs of the swivel chairs, in the polished brightness of the cherry desk-tops, in the fresh blotting-pads and the immaculate inkstands. To sit in this pleasant little apartment for half an hour is to receive quite a new impression of the possible luxury of business, the ultimate elegance of trade. This may be managed as easily as not if you happen to have any dealings with "D. Walworth Floyd, Agt."—according to the legend on the translucent pane of the door—who is quite unlikely to hurry you out before you have finished.

"Don't be in such a drive," he will perhaps say to you; "stay and smoke a cigar."

For business is not too exacting a consideration with the western branch of the Massachusetts Brass Company. It is less a hive of industry than a social exchange. The hours are easy, and the habitues are as frequently callers as customers. They are often Jacks or Toms, whose fathers are social pillars in Boston and large land-owners in Wyoming and Dakota, and Jack and Tom—birds of passage in Scotch cheviots and billycock hats—are given to alighting for a brief breathing-spell on this lofty perch, where they reproach the slipshod dress and careless, speech of their friend's small office force by the trim neatness of their own clothes and conversation.

It may be guessed that this snug haven of refuge has been established and maintained less to extend the Company's trade than to provide a place for the Company's Walworth. I say Company's Walworth, for in this case "company" and "family" are interchangeable terms. The Massachusetts Brass Company is the Floyd family, and the Floyd family is the Massachusetts Brass Company. The Company pays no dividends, but it is very generous in its salaries. It is liberal with Hosea G. Floyd, who is its president, and with Winthrop C. Floyd, who is its treasurer, and with H. Lovell Floyd, who is its New York agent, and with Cadwallader P. Floyd, who looks after the Philadelphia interests; nor does it quite forget D. Walworth Floyd, who holds up one end more or less effectively in the West. But Walworth is the last and the youngest of the Floyds; his marriage was not to the complete satisfaction of his family, and his single independent venture before leaving home, in the direction of coffee and spices, compelled his brothers to put their hands into their pockets rather deeply. So, while the rest of the Floyds think that, all considered, they have rather done the fair thing by Walworth, yet Walworth, on the other hand, regards his assignment to the West as a mild form of punishment and exile.

"It does give me a little elbow-room, though."

This is the silent acknowledgment that Walworth sometimes makes to himself—but grudgingly.

Walworth Floyd is a sleek, well-fed, prosperous-looking fellow of thirty. His figure is a trifle too short and dumpy to be pronounced absolutely good; but it is always strikingly well-dressed—for he has lived in the West hardly a year as yet. His face is not handsome, but it is gentlemanly quite. One might, indeed, complain of the retreating lines of his forehead, and regret, too, that his chin, once perfect, now shows leanings towards the duplex; but, on the other hand, his well-bridged nose, you are sure, has been figuring in family portraits for the last hundred years, and his plump hands, by reason of the fine texture of the skin and the shapeliness of the nails, form a point that is distinctly aristocratic. Yet penmanship, under his manipulations, becomes a very crabbed and laborious affair, and this light species of manual labor is usually performed, so far as he is concerned, by other hands. He has a sort of general clerk, and he shares the services of a stenographer with two or three of his neighbors. He employs, too, an office-boy, who would idle away a good deal of time if Walworth were not in the habit of sending frequent communications to the steward of his club. Walworth, garmented in his plump placidity, has been accustomed to fare sumptuously every day, and to worry his head about as few things as possible. His dining he does for himself; his thinking he has somebody else do for him: His book-keeping and auditing and so on are done in the East, and a friend of his—he has no enemies—once said that his stomach was in Chicago, while his brains were in Boston.

Walworth, considering his family training and traditions, is inexplicably expansive. Even more than his limited capabilities for business, even more than the exactions of a wife whose pinched girlhood has helped her to a full appreciation of her present membership in a wealthy family, has his own open-hearted bonhomie "kept him back." He is just the man to whom one writes a letter of introduction without any sense of imposing a burden, or to whom one may present it without experiencing any great sense of embarrassment. And it is a letter of introduction, in point of fact, which is now lying half folded on the extended elbow-rest of his desk, and has been lying there for a quarter of an hour.

Most of us know something about letters of introduction—promised so thoughtlessly, written so glibly, presented so reluctantly, received so grudgingly. But when the letter is merely a trifling and insignificant line—a line which has no great importance for the bearer and can cause no great annoyance to the recipient—and when its presentation here and its accounting for there may be considered as but a minute item in the general system of social book-keeping, then we have an episode that passes quickly and lightly for all concerned. Such appears to be the situation in the office of the Massachusetts Brass Company.

"'We are living upon Pine Street.'"

Walworth is tilted back comfortably in one of his handsome chairs and sends out a casual glance through the nearest window. The sun is struggling with a half-luminous haze, and through this haze a hundred streaks of smoke are driving headlong towards the lake. A tall clock-tower looms up three or four streets away, and one of its faces—on the looker's own level—gives the hour as half-past ten.

"Well, we are living up on Pine Street, Mr. Ogden," he is saying; "just this side of the Water Works—the place where the 'wheels go round,' you know. You beat me here by a few minutes this morning, but I think I can promise to be the first on the ground when you call on us there."

He is running his fingers over the edges of several little sheets of brass. A few bunches of these, together with a set or two of brass rings of varying diameters and thicknesses, are the only intimations of merchandise that the office yields. Sometimes even these are bundled away into a drawer, and then commerce is refined completely beyond the ken of the senses.

"However, don't go. I am a little late in getting around this morning, but the mail is light. Ferguson will look after it. Sit down again."

The visitor, thus urged, sank back into the chair from which he had just risen. He was a slender young man, of good height, and his age was perhaps twenty-four. His complexion was of the colorless kind that good health alone keeps from sallowness. His hair was a light brown and fine and thick, and it fell across his temples in the two smooth wings that were made by an accurate parting in the middle. He had the beginnings of a shadowy little moustache, and a pair of good eyes which expressed a fair amount of self-reliance and any amount of hope.

"And how are you finding the West Side?" Walworth pursued. "I don't know much about it myself. This is a big town and awfully cut up. A man has to pick out his own quarter and stick to it. If you move from one side of the river to another, you bid good-by to all your old friends; you never see them again. You said you were somewhere near Union Park, I believe?"

"Yes," George Ogden answered, "I have landed in a pretty good place, and I want to stay there if I can. They're a sort of farming people —or were, to start with. They came from New York State, I believe, and haven't been here but a year or two. Is there anybody in this town who hasn't come from somewhere else, or who has been here more than a year or two?"

Walworth laughed. "I haven't. But you go around some, and you may find a few that have."

"The mother cooks, the father markets, the daughter helps to wait on table. Nice, friendly people; make me think of those at home." He smiled a little wistfully. "About the only people so far that do."

"Well, I have heard that there are some pretty good streets over there," is Walworth's vague response.

"Ours is. We have trees—all of one sort and planted regularly, I mean. And ornamental lamp-posts. And I'm only a block from the Park. Everything seems all right enough."

"I dare say; but don't you find it rather far away from—?" queried Floyd, with a sort of insinuating intentness.

However, I have no idea of reproducing Walworth's remarks on the local topography. They were voluminous, but he would be found prejudiced and but partly informed. Besides, his little tirade was presently thrown out of joint by a dislocating interruption.

Walworth always experienced a mental dislocation, slight or serious, whenever his wife called at the office. Nor were matters much helped when his wife was accompanied by her sister. It was the latter of these who now opened the door with an assured hand and who shut it after the two of them with a confirmatory slam.

"Yes, here we are," she seemed to imply.

In Mrs. Walworth Floyd our young man met a lean and anxious little body, who appeared strenuous and exacting and of the kind who, as the expression goes, are hard to get along with. She had a sharp little nose and a pair of inquisitorial eyes. She was dressed richly, but as simply as a sword in its scabbard. If Walworth spent an evening abroad it was a fair assumption that his wife knew where he was and all about it. Otherwise the sword was drawn.

"We have been almost three quarters of an hour getting here," she said in a tense way. "Something was the matter with the cable and they kept us in the tunnel nearly twenty minutes. As I tell Ann, you can always count on that sort of thing when you've got anything of real importance on hand and not much time for it. And yet we talk about the jams and delays in Tremont Street!"

She drew down her mouth and blinked her eyes indignantly. She felt all the shortcomings of her new home very keenly; she made every one of them a personal affront.

"Ann thought it was amusing. Perhaps it won't seem so after it has happened to her three or four times more."

Walworth glanced apprehensively in the direction of his sister-in-law's chair. She was understood to be in his house on a brief visit. He trusted that she was not to be exposed a second time to so annoying an accident.

Ann Wilde was a stout woman who was nearing forty. Her appearance indicated that, while she had not escaped the buffets of the world, yet her past experiences had only seasoned and toughened her for her future ones. In this earthly turmoil of give and take she seemed to have played a full inning on each side. She had begun as a poetess, she had gone on as a boardinghouse keeper, and she was now ready to take her first step as an investor. To turn from literature to lodgings indicates talent; to do so well in lodgings as to have funds for the purchase of property indicates genius. Miss "Wilde, at fourteen, was a plain child whose straggling hair was drawn back from her forehead by an india-rubber comb that passed over the top of her head from ear to ear, and she was called Annie. At seventeen, conscious of the first flutterings of sentiment and prompted by indications of increasing comeliness, she re-named herself Annette. At twenty, somewhat disappointed in the promise of beauty, yet consoled in some degree by a spreading reputation as a versifier, she changed her name to Anne. At twenty-six, as the result of a disappointment in an affair of the heart and of a growing appreciation of the modesty of her social rôle, she resignedly styled herself Anna. And at thirty-five, fully convinced of her own hopeless plainness, of the completely practical cast of things generally, and of the uselessness of flying the flag of idealism any longer, she bobbed off at the same time both her hair and her name; she presented a short-cut poll of frizzled gray and she signed herself Ann. What's in a name? Sometimes nothing; sometimes a whole biography.

"I have been telling Mr. Ogden," said Walworth, "that he ought to be in our part of town—he ought to be one of our little circle." His wife looked up rather coldly; her little circle was not open to any new candidate that the uncalculating good-nature of her husband might propose. "That house around on Hush Street could take him in, I imagine. And all the people he will want to know are right around there. Why, you have been in Worcester, Frances; you know the Parkers. Well, Mrs. Parker is Mr. Ogden's aunt—aunt, I think you said?—yes, aunt; so you see about how it is. Always glad to welcome one more Eastern pilgrim to our little what-you-may-call-it—oasis, you know."

"Why didn't you say Mr. Ogden was from the East, Walworth?" asked his wife, taxingly, and looked at the young man for the first time.

Her gaze was critical, but not forbidding.

"Yes, most of us are on the North Side," she observed.

"Ogden is as good as a neighbor already," Walworth went on, perseveringly; "a business neighbor. He is going into the Underground National. Letters and all that, you know. Pretty good for three weeks, I call it. If most of our fellows who come out here did as well in three months it would be money in Mrs. Lloyd's pocket. To think of the fives and tens and twenties that have gone to old schoolmates of Win's and to fellows who knew Lovell when he was on the road!"

Ogden flushed a little and took the first step towards a frown. It is not pleasant to contemplate your possible inclusion in the reprehensible class of the strapped and the stranded, nor to feel that only a lucky letter of recommendation has saved a friend's wife from being crossed in some caprice or balked in some whim. But Floyd, although cordial and liberal, was not invariably fine.

"They stop me on the street, and they buttonhole me in the hotels, and you can't think how many of them come right here. Of course, I always do what I can. But how do they find me out? And why is it that when I am going up home late over the viaduct and somebody is hanging about to strike some man for a quarter, I am always the man to be struck? One or two of them have actually paid me back, but—"

"Who?" asked his sister-in-law. She had a loud, rasping voice. "The men on the viaduct?"

"The others," Walworth indicated briefly.

"You are too generous," said Ogden. What a position for a man who was not to enter upon an engagement to-morrow! And what might three months be, if judged by the hopes and fears and expectations and disappointments of his three weeks!

"The Underground?" repeated Mrs. Floyd, turning towards her husband. "Isn't that Mayme Brainard's father's bank?" she asked in a general way.

"Mr. Brainard is the president," assented Ogden, with a severe smile. "I addressed myself to the cashier," he added shortly.

"I was sure I had heard of it," she rejoined, with a glacial graciousness.

"Well, if you-have heard of it, my dear," her husband joked, "how widely known it must be! You ought to have heard of it; you've had enough checks on it, I'm sure!"

But Mrs. Floyd did not pursue the subject. She looked at her sister with that prim seriousness which means something on the mind—or on two minds—and her sister returned the look in kind; and they both looked in the same fashion back and forth between Walworth and his caller. Ann Wilde snapped the catch of her hand-bag once or twice, and glanced between times at some loose papers inside it. Ferguson, in the other room, thought he perceived the approach of a domestic crisis—a disputed dress-maker's bill, perhaps. Yet there might be other reasons. He knew that the cook was sometimes impertinent, and that the market-man now and then forgot to send the white-fish. He himself was a mere boarding bachelor, yet he had come to learn something of the relief which follows the shifting of a housekeeper's cares to the shoulders of the housekeeper's husband. Ferguson had relieved the tedium of many a half-hour by short-handing bits of dialogue that accompanied connubial spats between his employer and his employer's wife.

These signs and tokens were not lost on Ogden; he rose again to go. You were they lost on Floyd himself, whose apprehension of a bad quarter of an hour was heightened by the absence, as yet, of any exact data. He had no wish to hold the field alone, and he begged Ogden not to hurry his departure.

"Where are the girls?" he asked his wife. "I thought you said they came along with you."

"They did. They are in the building. They will be up in a few minutes. That child!—somebody ought to look after her."

"Then why not wait a little while?" Floyd suggested to Ogden. "My wife's affair won't take long. Ferguson, won't you just clear off that chair out there and find the paper? And now, what is it?" he asked the two women when they were left together.

[II]

"Well, Ann has heard from those Minneapolis people again. And she isn't any nearer making up her mind than before."

"Here's what they say," added his sister-in-law. She took a letter out of her bag and handed it to him.

"Oh!" said Walworth. He felt half relieved, half vexed.

His wife stood by the window, rubbing her forefinger along the edges of its silver lettering.

"I don't see whatever put Minneapolis into Ann's head. There seems to be a plenty of buildings right here."

She looked at the rough brick back of a towering structure a few hundred feet away, and at the huddle of lower roofs between. From a skylight on one of these a sunbeam came reflected, and compelled her to move.

"And plenty of dirt, too, if she is after real estate; plenty to be sold, and plenty of people to sell it. I never saw a town where it was more plentiful."

She glanced downwards at the wagons and cars that were splashing through the streets after a rainy September night. "Why shouldn't there be more people to shovel it, too? You see their signs stuck up everywhere—the dealers, I mean."

"Ann can get to Minneapolis in thirteen hours," suggested Walworth, passing the end of his thumb along one of his eyebrows. "What's that, after the trip West? And then she can see for herself. You take the cars here late in the afternoon, and you get there in time for breakfast."

"I believe I'd just let it drop," said Miss Wilde, "if I happened to know positively of any good thing here. They write a nice enough letter, but I can't tell what state the building is in unless I see it. And I'm merely taking their word that the ground is worth a hundred and fifty. There's forty feet. I wonder if 'all improvements in' means that the street is paved."

"Drop it, anyway," said her sister, as if she were disembarrassing herself of some loathsome parcel. "Look around in Chicago itself. You can see what you are buying, then. Even if you do invest here, you are not compelled to live here." She became almost rigid in her disdain.

"Ah—um!" murmured Walworth, in a noncommittal way.

The door opened suddenly, and two young girls entered in a brisk fashion. The first one had a slight figure, a little above the average height. To-day people called her slender; six or eight years later they would be likely to call her lean. She had long, thin arras, and delicate, transparent hands. She had large eyes of a deep blue, and the veins were plainly outlined on her pale temples. She had a bright face and a lively manner, and seemed to be one who drew largely on her nervous force without making deposits to keep up her account. Her costume was such as to give one the idea that dress was an important matter with her.

"Well, Frankie!" she called to Mrs. Floyd, "you found your way here all right, did you? You're a clever little body! Or did Miss Wilde help you?"

Mrs. Floyd passed back the Minneapolis letter to her sister and bestowed a lady-like frown on the new-comers. She disliked to be called "Frankie," but what is to be done between cousins?

"Jessie!" she expostulated softly, indicating Ogden in the adjoining room.

"You can't think," the girl went on, to Ogden redux, "how proud my cousin is of her ignorance of Chicago. She knows where to buy her steaks, and she has mastered the shortest way down town, and that's about all. Frankie, dear, where is the City Hall?"

"Two young girls entered."

"How should I know?" returned Frances Floyd, with a weary disdain.

"Why, there's the corner of it," cried Jessie Bradley, at the window, "not two blocks off. It's big enough to see!"

"And she's been here a whole year, too!" cried her husband, proudly and fondly.

Mrs. Floyd drew Jessie Bradley aside. "I know I'm very ignorant," she said, speaking in a low tone, "but there is one thing you can tell me about, if you want to. 'Why have you been so long in getting up to the office? You said Mayme—Mayme; I suppose that means Mary—you said that she was going to stop in the bank for just two or three minutes."

Jessie looked towards her young friend, who was seated near Ogden on one of the wide window-sills. Then she turned back to her questioner, with eyes that were steady and perhaps a bit defiant.

"Well, we stopped for a minute in that insurance office on the way up. We came part way by the stairs. Mayme said she had just got to see him. I don't see how she can meet him anywhere else. They won't let him come to the house. I can't see that her brother has treated him so very well."

Mrs. Floyd's regard travelled from the culprit, before her to the greater culprit on the windowsill. Mary Brainard was a pretty little thing of eighteen, with a plump, dimpled face. She had wide eyes of baby-blue under a fluffy flaxen bang. The brim of her hat threw a shadow over her pink cheeks, and she was nibbling the finger-ends of her gloves between her firm white teeth.

Mrs. Floyd considered this picture with grave disapproval, and turned back to her young cousin a face full of severe reproach.

"Jessie, I don't like this. It wasn't a nice thing for you to do at all, and I'm sure your mother would agree with me. Don't mix in any such matter. Let her own people attend to it."

Mary Brainard noticed this whispered passage, and suspected herself under comment. Her face, rather weakly pretty generally, was quite flushed and brilliant now, and she looked out from under her wide hat with the forced audacity that a lightly esteemed nature may sometimes assume, and afterwards, to everybody's surprise, may justify. She began to chat brightly with Ogden. Her gayety, however, was evidently but the spending momentum of some recent impact, and the bright defiance with which she glanced around the group was not more a surprise to them than to herself.

Jessie Bradley crossed over to the window and found a third place on its wide sill. Walworth gathered the two ladies behind the shelter of his big desk, and the Minneapolis matter was resumed.

"No," said Jessie, as she settled down, "Mrs. D. Walworth Floyd doesn't know where the City Hall is." She was in a slightly nervous state, and she caught hold of the first piece of conversational driftwood that came her way. "I ought to have asked her something easier—where La Salle Street was, for instance. I wonder if she knows she's on it now."

"Well, Mr. Ogden is going to have a chance to learn all about La Salle Street!" cried Mayme Brainard, with the air of one who dreads the slightest pause in the talk. "He's going into the Bank, he tells me."

"That will do very well for six days in the week," declared the other. "How about the seventh?" she asked with a twinkling directness. "Are you an Episcopalian, or what?"

"What, I fancy. Why, in Borne, I suppose, I shall do as the Romans do. For the forenoon there are the newspapers, of course. Then for the afternoon—the races, perhaps. In the evening—well, the theatre, I should say. That's about the plan at my house."

"Well, I've never been to the theatre Sunday evening, nor any of my people. And I don't believe that many nice people do go, either. Perhaps you think that there are not any nice people in Chicago—I've heard the remark made. Well, there are, I can tell you—just as nice as anywhere. I suppose you've noticed the way the papers here have of collecting all the mean, hateful things that the whole country says about us, and making a column out of them. I dare say they think it's funny. I don't know but what it is. There's my own father, now. He reads those things right after the market-reports, and time and time again I've seen him laugh till he cried. Yet he isn't any fonder of a joke than anybody else. He says it's better to be abused and made fun of than not to be noticed at all. How does it strike you?"

She made a little moue, as she recalled one or two of these national love-taps.

"And I must say it's awful, too—the sort of news that is sent out from here—excursions and alarums, and nothing else. During the anarchist time folks down East were a good deal more scared than we were. And I remember, when I was at school, I read in the Philadelphia papers that typhoid fever was raging in Chicago. They gave the death-rate and everything. I came home as fast as I could. I expected to find the whole family dying. But they didn't know anything about it. And they took my pocket-money to pay the return fare. They were alive enough."

Ogden smiled. He saw that he was face to face with a true daughter of the West; she had never seen him before, and she might never see him again, yet she was talking to him with perfect friendliness and confidence. Equally, he was sure, was she a true daughter of Chicago; she had the one infallible local trait—she would rather talk to a stranger about her own town than about any other subject.

"I think we shall have to reform you," she went on presently, "in advance. I believe the proper place for you next Sunday would be St. Asaph's. But it's high, you understand. Come over; my cousin has room in her pew. There is a vested choir, and when you have heard Vibert's singing—"

She stopped, as if to appreciate her own daring—like a child lighting a match. Mary Brainard gave a little start and put her hand on her friend's arm, yet at the same time she blushed slightly—less, perhaps, in panic than in pride.

"—you will learn what it is that brings Mayme Brainard all the way over from Union Park twice every Sunday," were the words with which this sentence was mentally concluded. "It's like an angel," she continued aloud. "A certain kind of angel," she added to herself. "Do you sing?" "Yes, a little."

"Then of course you play. But that doesn't count. Do you write? But everybody does that, too. I do. Or did. I carried off a prize once. It kept me in flowers for a week. Well, what is it—dialect or psychological?"

"Business letters," answered Ogden, with a balking sobriety.

"Pshaw! Well, then, can you sketch, or can you do anything in water-colors? I did a lovely head of Desdemona once—in crayon. That was at Ogontz."

"Kodak," Ogden confessed briefly. "Views along the wharves in Boston; some pretty bits from around Stockbridge."

"My own story was in Stockbridge! Our artist on the spot!" She clapped her hands together joyfully. "What else? Can you—cook?"

"No."

"Neither can I!"

"Can you keep books?" he asked in turn.

"Not a bit."

"Well, I can."

"You take the odd trick. Wait a minute, though. How about private theatricals?" she asked.

"I have acted in them once or twice."

She looked aslant at Mary Brainard. The girl seemed glad that St. Asaph's had been dropped, but she was hoping, fearfully, that it might be taken up again.

"Well, Father Tisdale has everything just about perfect. He's from St. John the Evangelist—Boston, you know. And you ought to hear little Mike Besser. He's our butcher's boy—only eleven. Sometimes he and Russell Vibert"—the other girl vibrated at this first audacious mention of the full name—"sing duets together, and then—"

Her eyes rolled around the room in a mock ecstasy and rested on the group of elders, whose three heads just showed above the top of the desk. Walworth's face made quite a picture of discomfort and distress, as he rose from his chair with the effect of trying to shake himself loose from the complications that his wife and Sister Ann were weaving about him.

"The whole building is full of them," he said, rather pettishly; "there are half a dozen on every floor. But I don't know anything about any of them."

He looked inquiringly towards the window seat.

"Ogden might."

"How is that?" inquired the young fellow, rising.

"Some real-estate man. Mrs. Floyd's sister here has about concluded to cast in her lot with us. She wants an adviser. Perhaps you happen to know of—"

He took on the ingenuous air of one who is earnestly searching for information—in the least likely quarter.

Ogden laughed self-consciously.

"Well, now, as a matter of fact, I do. His name is McDowell. He is on the second floor above. I have a sort of personal interest in him. He will be my brother-in-law within a month or six weeks."

A slight flutter among the women—the mention of matrimony.

"Do you want to try that, Ann?" asked Floyd.

"We became acquainted with him down East, last year," Ogden went on, proud to show his newness wearing off. "He was working up a syndicate. He calls himself a hustler. He tells me he has just opened a new subdivision out south somewhere—beyond Washington Park, I believe. I think you'll find him posted."

Older people than Ogden frequently go out of their way to run cheerfully the risk of advising others in business matters.

"I believe I'll see him, anyway," decided Miss Wilde. Like all women, she embraced the personal element in every affair. The people in Minneapolis became mere myths, now that she found herself so near to the future husband of the sister of the man who had just presented a letter of introduction to her own brother-in-law. The chain was long, to be sure, and some of its links were rather weak—but it served.

Mrs. Floyd arose, shaking out the folds of her dress and smoothing away the wrinkles that the last half-hour had accumulated on her forehead.

"I have asked Mr. Ogden to go to church with us Sunday," Jessie Bradley announced to her. "And he is going to bring some Stockbridge photographs."

"First-rate!" cried Walworth, relieved by any outcome whatever. "Stockbridge! Why, that's where I did my courting!"

Mrs. Floyd was caught in a melting mood.

"We shall be very happy to see Mr. Ogden," she pronounced primly.

[III]

In one of the first-floor corners of the Clifton is situated the Underground National Bank—Erastus H. Brainard, president.

The Underground is not so styled on account of the policy and methods of its head, oblique and subterranean though they may be; it is merely that the Clifton is almost entirely shut in by its tall neighbors, and that, so far as its lower floors are concerned, direct sunlight, except for a month or two in the early summer, is pretty nearly out of the question. We shall have to throw our own sunlight on the Underground and on the man who is its president and its principal stockholder.

The Underground is not one of the old banks, nor is it one of the large ones; if Brainard had no other irons in the fire he would not cut much of a figure in business circles. The Underground is simply one in a batch of banks that have sprung up in the last seven or eight years and that are almost unknown, even by name, to men who, in the clearing-house at that time, have since passed on to other and different affairs. It is spoken of as Brainard's bank, just as other banks are spoken of as Shayne's, or Cutter's, or Patterson's. Sow Shayne, for example, began life with a fruit-stand—Jim Shayne they called him. The fruit-stand developed into a retail grocery, and Jim Shayne (about the time of the Fire) became J. H. Shayne. The retail grocery expanded into a wholesale grocery, and the sign read, "James H. Shayne & Co.," and the firm made money. But the day dawned when his wife began to figure at dances and receptions—her own and those of other people—as Mrs. James Horton Shayne, and when his daughter's wedding was not far away, with all the splendor that St. Asaph's could command. This was no juncture for laying undue stress on the wholesale grocery business; it seemed worth while to become identified a little less closely with mercantile circles and a little more closely with financial circles. Shayne & Co. went right on—both routine and profits; but the High-flyers' National was started, and James Horton Shayne was more likely to be found on La Salle Street than on River Street.

Cutter was in hardware. His daughter was a great beauty. One day he dropped hardware in favor of his sons, to become the head of a board of directors. Then people could say, "Ah! a fine girl that! Her father runs the Parental National."

Patterson's case was different. He had just invested half a million in a big business block, and his daughter had just invested her all in a husband. The best office in the new building remained tenantless at the end of six months, and the man of his daughter's choice continued practically without occupation during the same term. The office was worth ten thousand dollars, the son-in-law—in the present state of things—about ten thousand cents. So Patterson, in order to secure a tenant for his new building and a career for his new son, started a new financial institution—the Exigency Trust Co.

But no such considerations as these influenced Erastus Brainard when he founded the Underground. He was far aside from all social ambitions, and his domestic affairs took care of themselves. His business interests spread all over the city, the state, the West, even the Ear West, and this vast web must have a centre. That centre was on the lower floor of the Clifton, where he ran a bank, true, but a good many other things besides.

Brainard had come up from the southern part of the state—from "Egypt," as it is called. A darkness truly Egyptian brooded over his early history, so that if it is a fact that he was an exhorter at Methodist camp-meetings in his early twenties, proof of that fact might be sought for in vain. The first definite point in his career is this: that as a youngish man he was connected in some capacity with a cross-country railroad on the far side of Centralia. How successful he was in transporting souls no one can say; that he has been successful in transporting bodies no one will deny. He is unrivalled in his mastery of the street-car question, and his operations have lain in many scattered fields.

To claim that Brainard has a national reputation would be going too far. However, his reputation might fairly be termed inter-state. If the man were to die to-morrow, sketches of his life would appear in the papers of Milwaukee, Indianapolis, and St. Louis; and the caustic and frankly abusive paragraphs would be copied appreciatively as far as the remoter counties of Nebraska. For Brainard's success is not without the elements of public scandal. His manipulation of city councils and of state legislatures has been freely charged. Old stories of his brief incarceration in prison, or of his narrow escape from it, sometimes arise and flutter; and there are those who think that if he never has been in jail, then this is all the more reason for his being there now. His demise would indeed set the clipping-bureaus to work; but the work would not be started by the direction of his surviving family. Such is the chief to whom young George Ogden has sworn allegiance.

"I shall marry him," said a voice quite firmly; "you may make up your mind to that."

Ogden started. These words came through a door which stood ajar in the partition that separated him from the president's room; the office was splendid with bevelled glass and oxidized iron-work, yet it was as compact as high rentals compel. They were words in striking contrast to most of the talk that his pen commanded. "Make it thirty days more"; "I'll take the rest in small bills, please"; "It will be due day after to-morrow." And with these—"I shall marry him; make up your mind to that."

He knew the voice perfectly well; he had heard it a fortnight before in Floyd's office.

The door in the partition opened a foot or two wider; the bulky figure of Erastus Brainard appeared and his hard and determined face. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man with a close-clipped gray beard and a shaven upper lip. Two or three red veins showed prominently in his bulbous nose. He wore black broadcloth; his coat had a velvet collar, and on his shoulders there was a light fall of dandruff. He wore boots. On Sundays his boots had "tongues," and his trade was the mainstay of a German shoemaker who kept a shop behind his house, and whom, twice a year, he literally terrified into a fit.

But now his big figure clutched at the red-cherry door-jamb with a tremulous hesitancy, the hard, fierce eyes looked out appealingly from under their coarse and shaggy brows, and the proud and cruel lips opened themselves to address the young man with an order that was almost an entreaty.

"Ogden, won't you ask Mr. Fairchild to step this way?"

For a mouse had come into the place, and the elephant was in terror.

The Underground National Bank, with a surplus equal to a third of its capital, had not declared a dividend for several years. Brainard, along with his son and his brother, owned five eighths of the stock. Put these two facts together and surmise the rest. Understand, without the telling, how Brainard had bought back big blocks of stock from men who had invested on his own advice and representations, only to sell out at less than two thirds the price they had paid. Understand how widowed and unprotected women, with little realization of the remote possibilities of the science of banking and no realization at all of the way in which their five thousands had come to be worth so much less than five thousand, would come to his office to implore ingenuously with sobs and tears that he would give them back their money. Consider these and a dozen other phases of the pleasant pastime known as "freeze out," and then judge whether Brainard, by this time, were capable or no of braving, warding off, beating down, despising the threats, the imprecations, the pleadings, the attacks of the harmless domestic animal known as the investor. But now another domestic animal, the wilful daughter, had entered his lair, and with this new antagonist he felt himself unable to cope.

"Ogden, won't you ask Mr. Fairchild to step this way!"

Fairchild was only the cashier of the bank, while Brainard was its head; but Fairchild was a good deal of a man—and that was more than Brainard, with all his money and his brains and his consciencelessness, and all the added power of the three combined, could have claimed for himself. He was merely a financial appliance—one of the tools of the trade.

He had no friends—none even of the poor sort known as "business" friends. He had no social relations of any kind. He had no sense of any right relation to the community in which he lived. He had next to no family life. He had no apparent consciousness of the physical basis of existence—for him diet, rest, hygiene were mere nothings. But none of these considerations disturbed him very much. He could do without friends—having so good a friend in himself. He could dispense with social diversion—so long as the affairs of the Underground, and the Illuminating Company, and those Western mines continued to occupy his attention. He could rub along without the sympathy and respect of the community—while he and it held the relative positions of knife and oyster. He could do perfectly well without hygiene and proper regimen as long as dyspepsia and nerves and rheumatism were not too pressing in their attentions. And he could, of course, trust his family to run itself without any great amount of attention from its natural head.

His family had run itself for twenty odd years. It had gone on its scattered way rejoicing—after the good, new, Western fashion which finds the unit of society less in the family than in the individual; and now a very promising young filly, after having "run" herself for a good part of this twenty years, was on the point of taking the bit between her teeth and of running away altogether. The family carryall, whose front seat he had left in order that he might irresponsibly dangle his legs out from behind, was in danger of a runaway and a smash-up, and he was forced to the humiliating expedient of installing a more competent driver than himself in his own place behind the dashboard.

Ogden slid rapidly along the narrow aisle which ran behind the row of coops that confined the tellers, and found Fairchild going over yesterday's balances with the general bookkeeper. Here he was intercepted by the last of the messengers, who had had some delay in getting his batch of drafts and notes arranged properly into a route.

He was a boy of seventeen, with a pert nose and a pasty complexion. He had put on his hat with a backward tilt that displayed his bang. He was the son of a millionnaire stockholder, and was on the threshold of his business career. He panted for consideration, and he had found, during an experience of six months, that most consideration was to be won from the newest men.

"What's up now, George?" he asked, familiarly. He twitched his narrow little shoulders as he teetered back and forth on his toes. "Old man on the rampage some more? He's had it pretty bad for the last three weeks."

"Oh, get out!" Ogden responded briefly.

Fairchild was a man well on in the fifties. He had a quiet, self-contained manner, a smooth forehead, a gray moustache. His general trustworthiness was highly esteemed by Brainard, who generally treated him with civility and sometimes almost with consideration. He had his privileges. A member of the board of directors in the Brainard interest, he would be given the opportunity to resign whenever some especially dubious piece of business was looming up, with the certainty of re-election within the year. He was too old to tear himself up by the roots, and too valuable to be allowed, in any event, the radical boon of transplantation. Of course he paid for such a concession; he acted as a buffer between Brainard and the more pathetic of the stockholders, and now, as we see, he was summoned to deal with a domestic crisis.

"My dear girl," Ogden presently heard him saying in a dry, cautious, and yet somewhat parental tone, "you know what his position is. Not in the church; no, I don't mean that. He is only a policy clerk in that insurance office, at ten dollars a week, probably—hardly enough for him to live on decently, alone. Yes, I know he gets more from the choir, but even that—"

Ogden stopped one ear by propping his elbow on his ledger and putting his hand to his head, and went on with his writing as well as he could. But he had left the Underground for St. Asaph's; he was busy no longer with notes for collection, but with the notes—the melting tenor notes—of the all-admired Vibert. His fellow—clerks noiselessly retired, and a long train of choristers slowly made their way through the long aisle the others had left vacant. Among them Vibert—tall, dark, hard, and cruel; an angel, possibly; but if so, surely one of the fallen. And a little girl of eighteen, whose blue eyes showed out from under her fluffy blond locks, and whose lips were parted in a radiant, reverent smile, steadied a trembling hand on the back of a pew and looked after him with a fond, open, and intense regard that was a perfect epitome of love.

Those same blue eyes were now on the other side of the partition, regarding her father's lieutenant with a look as bright and hard as was ever her father's own; and as she listened to the words of warning, those same full and pliant lips set themselves in a firm line that Brainard himself could not have made straighter or more unswerving.

"Nobody really knows" the cashier went on, "who his people are, or where he is from, or anything definite about him. He is one of thousands. Here is a town full to overflowing with single young men. They come from everywhere, for all reasons. They are taken on faith, largely, and are treated pretty well. Most of them are all right, no doubt; but others—Of course I know nothing about Mr.—about this one; but your own brother, now—"

"That's just what I tell her," broke in Brainard, with a distressful whimper. "Burt says, and he knows it's true, that—"

Ogden again stopped his ears. If by any possibility there was aught good under that chaste surplice, he would not wilfully deprive himself of any chance for belief. If that full neck and heavy jaw and sinister eye and world-worn cheek and elaborate assumption of professional sanctity offered the slightest prospect of decent manliness and of happy home life, he would not allow one mere solitary phrase to shut that prospect out. But he could not shut out a disgust that gradually crept in upon him—a disgust for the man who would arrange the most sacred and confidential affairs of his family circle in the same general fashion that he would use for dealing with the concerns of an ordinary business acquaintance; a disgust for the family life in which such a state of things was possible. Had the girl no mother? She had, indeed; but that mother was an invalid—one who, with the advancing years, had come to know more and more of tonics and cordials, and less and less of her daughters' needs. Had she no brother? But what can a brother do?—order the intruder from the premises and intimidate him from returning, which Burt had done. Were there no friends or relations to see how matters were going and to speak out their minds boldly? But whenever has such a course availed? The friends cease to be friends, and the relatives are relatives at a greater remove only, and all goes on as before. No; there was only one way to settle this affair—the "business" way; and that way Brainard took—necessarily, instinctively.

He had never lived for anything but business. He had never eaten and drunk for anything but business—his family shared his farm-like fare and his primitive hours. He had never built for anything but business; though constantly investing in grounds and buildings, he had occupied his own home for fifteen years as a tenant merely, before he could bring himself to a grudging purchase. He never dressed for anything but business—he had never worn a dress-coat in his life. He wrote about nothing but business—his nearest relative was nevermore than "dear sir," and he himself was never otherwise than "yours truly"; and he wrote on business letterheads even to his family. And now that the present domestic difficulty was to be adjusted, no other method was available. But he had the satisfaction of feeling that his daughter was meeting him in his own spirit and on his own ground.

She eyed him with a cold and direct gaze like that of the sun which is setting in a clear winter sky. Not a single cloud-shred of affection showed itself in the wide expanse of crisp and tingling atmosphere which she seemed to have created about her; not a particle of floating vapor helped to diffuse a glow of sentiment over a situation which had much need of some such softening influence. Her fierce little glance tore down every scrap of reverence, of home love, of filial duty: life had never seemed to him quite so bald, so unfurnished, so bereft of un-businesslike non-essentials.'

"'I shall marry Russell,' she declared."

"I shall marry Russell," she declared, "in spite of you and in spite of everything. You may say that he has no money, and that you don't know his family; and Burt may forbid him the house and go prying into his private affairs; and you may say that he has no friends and no abilities, and as much more as you please. I don't care; I shall be his wife. I won't believe any of these things, and nobody shall separate us."

She rose, flushed and frowning, and walked out firmly. Fairchild opened the opposite door and moved off quietly to his own place. Brainard brushed aside a pile of abstracts and mortgages that encumbered his desk, found an opening big enough for his elbow, and leaned over his blotting-pad with an air of utter dejection and defeat.

[IV]

On the twelfth floor of the Clifton—at the far end of a long corridor—is the office of Eugene H. McDowell, real estate.

Ogden, at the beginning of one of his brief noonings, took the elevator up to the quarters of his coming brother-in-law.

He found McDowell stretching himself violently in his swivel chair, which was tilted as far back as its mechanism would permit; his head was thrown back, too, as far as anatomical considerations would allow. His eyes would have seen the ceiling if they had not been so tight shut; his Adam's apple appeared prominently between the turned-down points of his collar. His desk was strewn with a litter of papers, and the tassels depending from his map-rack began a trembling at varying heights as Ogden closed the door behind him.

"Waugh—oo!" yawned McDowell, with his mouth at its widest. Then he let his chair down, all at once. "Oh, it's you, George, is it?"

He used the careless and patronizing freedom of a man of thirty odd to another several years his junior—of a man in business for himself to a man in business for some one else—of a man who was presently to undertake the protection and support of the other's sister.

"Sit down." He motioned Ogden to a chair which stood close to the window—a window that looked out on the court and that commanded the multifarious panorama of daily business going on behind the ranks and rows of great glass sheets which formed the other three sides of the enclosure—the ends of over-crowded desks, the digital dumb-show of stenographers, the careful handling by shirt-sleeved clerks of the damp yellow sheets in copying-books, the shaking fingers and nodding heads that accompanied the persuasion and expostulation of personal interviews.

McDowell presented a physiognomy that seemed to have been stripped of all superfluities. He contrived to avoid the effect of absolute leanness, yet he was without a spare ounce of flesh. His cheek-bones did not obtrude themselves, nor were his finger-joints unduly prominent; yet his trousers seemed more satisfactory as trousers than his legs as legs, and his feet were in long, narrow, thin-soled shoes, through whose flexible leather one almost divined the articulations of his toes. His hair had shrunk back from his forehead and temples, but his moustache sprang out as boldly and decidedly as if constructed of steel wires. His nose was sharp; his eyes were like two gimlets. The effect of his presence was nervous, excitant, dry to aridity. He had a flattish chest and bony shoulders; his was an earthly tabernacle that gave its tailor considerable cause for study.

"Tour friends called again this morning," he began, folding up two or three documents and thrusting them into the pigeon-holes before him. "We have had quite a session. But they're fixed finally. Does that cousin of theirs live with them?"

"Cousin? Isn't she their sister—sister-in-law?"

"I mean the other one; Miss—Bradley, isn't it?"

"Oh! Well, no; she comes in and stays with them a week now and then. But her people live in Hinsdale."

"Hinsdale; nice country around there. Seems as if you just had to get outside of Cook County to find anything hilly or even rolling. I'd like to take it up first rate. The minute you are over the county line you get clean out of all that flat land and everything's up and down—like around Worcester. But I don't believe they save much on taxes."

He tore some pencilled memoranda off the top of a pad and threw them into the waste-basket.

"Yes, the sister-in-law was here, all right enough. She's a pretty smart woman, too; got a good deal more head than any of the rest of them. She's striking out a little late, but she may make something of herself yet.

"But she wants to get that poetical streak out of her," he went on. "What was it she said, now? Oh, yes; all this down-town racket came to her like the music of a battle-hymn. Our hustling, it seems, resembles a hand-to-hand combat from street to street—she lugged in mediaeval Florence. And to finish up with, she told me I was like a gladiator stripped for the fray." He ran his hand down the stripes of his handsome trousers. "What did she mean by that? Was it some of her Boston literary business?"

He lifted his hand and thoughtfully twirled the scanty locks over one of his ears.

"Here's a letter I got this morning from Hittie." He drew out a small folded sheet from the bottom of a pile of correspondence. "She has about come around to my way of thinking. There don't seem any very good reason for my travelling away down there again, especially when your father and mother are going to move out here anyway. I'm awful busy. She'll have her own family at the wedding, then, and she'll give me a show to scare up some of mine. Things are just too rushing—that's the amount of it."

"I'm glad to have it settled one way or another," George said. "And how about that other affair—have you made any report to father?"

"Yes. That's as good as settled. The deeds are all made out; they've only got to be signed." He reached into one of his pigeon-holes and brought out a bulk of bluish paper whose fractious folds were held in some shape by a wide rubber strap. "Here's one of the abstracts—just come in. The other is a good deal longer and the copy isn't finished. I suppose they'll put that one on a board."

He snapped the band once or twice and put the abstract back again.

"I'm glad," he said, "that your father has finally decided to pull up altogether and to transfer everything to the West. That old block of his was wanting repairs all the time; I don't believe it paid him four per cent. It takes more than soldiers' monuments and musical festivals to make a town move."

George felt his heart give an indignant throb. He seemed to see before him the spokesman of a community where prosperity had drugged patriotism into unconsciousness, and where the bare scaffoldings of materialism felt themselves quite independent of the graces and draperies of culture. It seemed hardly possible that one short month could make his native New England appear so small, so provincial, so left-behind.

"You've got to have snap, go. You've got to have a big new country behind you. How much do you suppose people in Iowa and Kansas and Minnesota think about Down East? Not a great deal. It's Chicago they're looking to. This town looms up before them and shuts out Boston and New York and the whole seaboard from the sight and the thoughts of the West and the North west and the New Northwest and the Far West and all the other Wests yet to be invented. They read our papers, they come here to buy and to enjoy themselves." He turned his thumb towards the ceiling, and gave it an upward thrust that sent it through the six ceilings above it. "If you'd go up on our roof and hear them talking—"

"Oh, well," said George; "hadn't we better get something to eat?"

"And what kind of a town is it that's wanted," pursued McDowell, as he pulled down the cover of his desk, "to take up a big national enterprise and put it through with a rush? A big town, of course, but one that has grown big so fast that it hasn't had time to grow old. One with lots of youth and plenty of momentum. Young enough to be confident and enthusiastic, and to have no cliques and sets full of bickerings and jealousies. A town that will all pull one way. What's New York?" he asked, flourishing his towel from the corner where the wash-stand stood. "It ain't a city at all; it's like London—it's a province. Father Knickerbocker is too old, and too big and logy, and too all-fired selfish. We are the people, right here. Well, Johnny, you hold the fort," he called to a boy who was dividing an open-eyed attention between this oration and his own sandwich; "I've got to have a bite myself."

"How are you getting on downstairs?" he asked, as they tramped over the tiles of the long corridor towards the elevators. "I hear you were over at Brainard's house last night—he's a fine bird. And his son is like him. He's got another, hasn't he—a younger one? In the bank, isn't he? Used to be. Well, he might be without your knowing it. Queer genius—his father don't know what to do with him. He's kind of in the background, as it were. How did you happen to go over there?"

"Papers to sign. Mr. Brainard was at home, sick. It was something that they could hardly give to any of the boys to manage. I met his other daughter."

"Other? Didn't know he had any. Got two, has he? And two sons. Well, he's a great old father, from all I hear, and I shouldn't—D—ow—n!"

But the elevator was too far past them to return.

"Here's another coming," said George, to whom the indicator showed that a cab had left the top story and was half way down to their level.

Ogden had now gone through a novitiate of five or six weeks. After his first wrench—from the East to the West—his second one—from the West Side to the North—seemed an unimportant matter. He had learned his new neighborhood, had made a few acquaintances there, had become familiar with his work at the bank; and the early coming of his own family, who had elected to swell the great westward movement by the contribution of themselves and all their worldly goods, helped him to the feeling of being tolerably well at home. From the vantage-ground of a secure present and a promising future he became an interested observer of the life that swept and swirled about him. He found that there might be an inner quiet under all this vast and apparently unregulated din: he recalled how, in a cotton factory or a copper foundry, the hands talked among themselves in tones lower than the average, rather than higher. The rumble of drays and the clang of street-car gongs became less disconcerting; the town's swarming hordes presently appeared less slovenly in their dress and less offensive in their manners than his startled sensibilities had found them at first; even their varied physiognomies began to take on a cast less comprehensively cosmopolitan. His walks through the streets and his journeyings in the public conveyances showed him a range of human types completely unknown to his past experience; yet it soon came to seem possible that all these different elements might be scheduled, classified, brought into a sort of catalogue raisonné which should give every feature its proper place—skulls, foreheads, gaits, odors, facial angles; ears, with their different shapes and sets; eyes, with their varying shapes and colors; hair, with its divergent shades and textures; noses, with their multiplied turns and outlines; dialects, brogues, patois, accents in all their palatal and labial varieties and according to all the differentiations in pharynx, larynx, and epiglottis.

He disposed as readily of the Germans, Irish, and Swedes as of the negroes and the Chinese. But how to tell the Poles from the Bohemians? How to distinguish the Sicilians from the Greeks? How to catalogue the various grades of Jews? How to tabulate the Medes, and the Elamites, and the Cappadocians, and the dwellers from Mesopotamia?

During the enforced leisure of his first weeks he had gone several times to the City Hall, and had ascended in the elevator to the reading-room of the public library. On one of these occasions a heavy and sudden down-pour had filled the room with readers and had closed all the windows. The down-pour without seemed but a trifle compared with the confused cataract of conflicting nationalities within, and the fumes of incense that the united throng caused to rise upon the altar of learning stunned him with a sudden and sickening surprise—the bogs of Kilkenny, the dung-heaps of the Black Forest, the miry ways of Transylvania and Little Russia had all contributed to it.

The universal brotherhood of man appeared before him, and it smelt of mortality—no partial, exclusive mortality, but a mortality comprehensive, universal, condensed and averaged up from the grand totality of items.

In a human maelstrom, of which such a scene was but a simple transitory eddy, it was grateful to regain one's bearings in some degree, and to get an opportunity for meeting one or two familiar drops. It had pleased him, therefore, to find that Brainard's house was in the neighborhood of Union Park and in the immediate vicinity of his own first lodgings: and when he went over there with his documents in his pocket he appreciated the privilege of ringing the bell of a door behind which were one or two faces that he might recognize.

The Brainards lived on a corner, and the house was so set as to allow a narrow strip of yard along the side street. It was built in the yellow limestone which used to come from quarries at Joliet, and the architect had shown his preference for the exaggerated keystones that had so great a vogue in the late sixties. The house had a basement, and above the elaborate wooden cornice there was a mansard with several windows that were set in a frame-work of clumsy and pretentious carpentry. Behind the house was a brick stable; it had been built of cheap material and covered with a cheaper red wash. The dampness of the lower walls had caused this wash to discolor and then to fall off altogether. Around the premises there ran an old-fashioned iron fence; it stood on a stone coping that was covered with perpendicular streaks of yellow rust. In the yard a meandering asphalt walk led past a few lilacs and syringas, which were looked down upon by a painful side porch that nobody ever used. The walk in front of the house was of stone; that at the side was of plank and showed three long lines of nail-heads.

The interior, so far as it came under Ogden's notice, was furnished with a horrible yet consistent simplicity. The large rooms were set sparely with chairs, tables, and sofas that represented the spoil of Centralia, and there were few modern additions to introduce discords. An ideal sculptured head, placed on a marble pedestal swathed in a fringed scarf of saffron silk and set between the lace curtains so as to show from the street, would have ruined the effect both within and without. Perhaps the same might be said of any other house.

Brainard himself was not visible; he was only audible. His deep voice came in a sort of deadened growl through the closed door of a small side room; and mingled with it were the querulous tones of a woman's voice—an elderly woman, a woman in poor health, a woman whom some sudden and distressful stroke had brought to the verge of tears.

The house had been built in the primitive days when local architecture was still in such exact accord with local society that anything like graded receptions was undreamed of. Everybody who seemed too good to be kept waiting in the hall was shown into the front parlor. This room had a carpet whose design was in large baskets of bright flowers, and a ceiling that was frescoed in a manner derived from a former style of railroad decoration. This scheme of decoration centred around a massive and contorted chandelier with eight globes. Nobody had ever seen the whole eight "going" at one time. Lincoln and his family were on one side of the marble mantel-piece; Grant and his family on the other.

It was in this room that Ogden was received by the elder daughter of the house. She seemed a quiet, self-poised girl, four or five years the senior of her sister. She amply filled her gown of gray woollen; her hair was drawn back from her forehead and made a knot just above the nape of her neck. She had a pair of cool, steady gray eyes. She appeared wholesome, stable, capable of keeping herself well in hand.

"My father isn't able to see you," she said; "but if you will give me what you have brought I will take it to him."

There was a tremulousness in her voice, quite at variance with her manner and appearance. She put out her hand with a wavering motion; the flaring of the gas in her face seemed to strike her with a positive pain.

A door opened suddenly and her brother Burt came in. He was a stocky young man three or four years older than Ogden. He seemed stuffed with importance both present and future, both personal and parental—he was himself and his father rolled into one.

"Abbie," he said, in a sharp, curt way, "I wish you'd find father the copy of that report you made for him yesterday." He looked at Ogden in a fashion that changed the young man from a person to a thing. "We have been looking for you some time," he said. "I'll take those papers myself."

He spoke in a way that was abrupt and autocratic. Ogden recognized it as the utterance of a masterful nature, but he was unable to see that the masterful nature was moved by an emotion that must be controlled and concealed. His indignation made no allowance for this, and his subsequent ten minutes of solitary reflection left a bitterness that passed away but lingeringly. More and more, with every moment of this short wait, did he feel himself a gentleman turned into a lackey by his inferiors.

"A door opened suddenly, and her brother Burt came in."

There was no salve for his wounded sensibilities save, perhaps, in the look of dumb expostulation which the girl cast upon her brother and in the few commonplace words which she addressed to their caller before she went out.

"Kindly wait a few moments, and the papers will be ready to take back. Perhaps you will find this other chair more comfortable."

It was after this fashion that he first met Abbie Brainard; met her—as he reported it to McDowell—and hardly more.

He followed his brother-in-law into the elevator and they dropped swiftly to the ground floor. At this level is situated the Acme Lunch Room.

[V]

McDowell took a cup of tea and an expeditious doughnut standing, and hurried away. Ogden, who had not overcome his habit of leisurely eating, lingered behind.

The Acme occupies a square, low-ceiled room in the hindermost corner of the Clifton: perhaps, with a lower ceiling and a situation on a level lower still, it would have been called the Zenith. It is fitted up with three or four oval counters, and a very close calculation of space allows room for an infinitesimal cashier's desk as well. Each oval encloses a high rack that is heaped with rolls, buns, and cakes, and close to each rack stands a brace of big, cylindrical, nickel-plated tanks that yield coffee and tea. Each oval is fringed with a row of stools—hard-wood tops on a cast-iron base; and in warm weather a pair of fans, which are moved by power supplied from the engine-room, revolve aloft and agitate the stifling atmosphere.

Ogden had spent the past week in trying a succession of dairies, lunch-rooms, and restaurants, and had ended by returning to the Acme, which seemed as decent and convenient as any. He found a place in a quiet corner; ordered his coffee, wheat-muffins, and pie, which all came together; and fell to work with his eye soberly fixed on the shining expanse of the freshly-wiped counter. Was he consistent, he wondered, in claiming any great consideration until he could lunch at a higher figure than fifteen or twenty cents?

The girl who had waited on him turned away, but another one, who stood a little distance off, called her back.

"Here, Maggie, change that mince. This gentleman don't want a piece with a whole corner knocked off."

Ogden buttered his muffin without raising his eyes. The second girl herself placed the new cut of pie before him and stood looking down upon him. The hour was a little late, and but three or four customers held places around the counters. Presently she spoke.

"Well, Mister Ogden," she said, with a humorous tartness, "you don't seem to recognize your old friends."

Ogden threw up his head. "Why, Nealie, is this you!" he exclaimed. It was a girl who had helped wait on table at his West Side boardinghouse.

She wore a dark dress with a plain white collar. Her brows made two fine straight lines over the yellowish green of her eyes. She had a strong, decided face, yet there was a certain lurking delicacy in the outlines of nose and chin.

"That's what," she replied. "I've made a change, you see. Been here pretty near a week. Come in often?"

"I'm in the building. What was the matter with your other place?"

The girl hitched up her shoulders. "The fact of it is, I couldn't get used to it. Never tried anything like that before."

She looked about cautiously and then resumed in a confidential voice,

"To tell the truth, I was just forced into it. Pa and ma didn't want me to come to Chicago, but I couldn't make out that I was going to have any terrible great show there in Pewaukee. I didn't s'pose it was going to be so awful hard to find something to do in a big place like this. But I made up my mind, all the same, that I wasn't going to cave in and go back to Wisconsin—not straight off, anyway. Kept right on trotting about. Any port in a storm, says I. And when I met that good old soul in the intelligence office, that settled it. She only wanted a second girl; but I thought I could stand it."

"Couldn't you?"

He found a place in a quiet corner.

"I didn't tell ma, though, that I was living out. I wrote to her that I was clerking—ten dollars a week. Ten dollars!—I'm looking for the girl that gets more than six. I don't know what the folks would have thought if they'd known of me a-being ordered around by a lot of young fellers—run and fetch and carry for a parcel of strangers. It don't come natural to me to be bossed, I can tell you."

"But Mrs. Gore used you well?"

"She did, for a fact. But it wasn't the sort of thing I wanted at all. So I told her I guessed I'd go. 'Well,' says she, sort of resigned like, 'if you've made up your mind to, you must, I s'pose'; she was sorry to lose me, I know. She walked to the-basement door with me to say good-by—with her specs on top of her head. 'Be a good girl,' says she, 'and let us hear from you'—'most exactly what ma said when I came away. Gray hair, just like ma's, too. 'Yes, ma'am,' says I. I didn't say 'ma'am' because I thought I was a servant—I wasn't; but because she was older and because I had a respect for her. And so I shall let her hear from me; when I get along a little further I'm going to call on her. And I'm going to get along, let me tell you; I haven't jumped on to this hobby-horse of a town just to stay still."

The Cliff-Dwellers: A Novel

THE CLIFF-DWELLERS

A Novel

BY

HENRY B. FULLER

ILLUSTRATED BY T. DE THULSTRUP

THE GREGG PRESS / RIDGEWOOD, N. J.

1898

Cecilia Ingles

[ILLUSTRATIONS]