The Cliff-Dwellers | Page 7

was called Annie. At seventeen, conscious of the first flutterings of sentiment and prompted by indications of increasing comeliness, she re-named herself An nette. 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 mod esty of her social role, she resignedly styled her self 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; some times a whole biography.
"I have been telling Mr. Ogden," said "Waiworth, "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. Floyd's pocket. To think of the fives and tens arid 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 contem plate 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 in variably fine.
"They stop me on the street, and they button hole 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 Og den, 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 serious ness 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