The Cliff-Dwellers | Page 9

her steaks, and she has mastered the shortest way down town, and that's about all. Frankie, dear, where is the City Hall?"
"How should ," 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 I"
"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 May me 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 win dow-sills. Then she turned back to her questioner, with eyes that were steady and perhaps a bit defiant.
"Veil, we stopped for a minute in that insur ance 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 cous in 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 audac ity that a lightly esteemed nature may some times assume, and afterwards, to everybody's surprise, may justify. She began to chat bright ly with Ogden. Her gayety, however, was evi dently 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. Waiworth gathered the two ladies behind the shel ter 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 conver sational 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 Rome, 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 yon 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 -re ports, and time and time again I've seen him laugh till he cried. Tet he isn't any fonder of a joke than anybody else.