The Cliff-Dwellers | Page 7

talent; to do so well in lodgings as to have funds for the purchase of
property indicates genius. Miss "Wilde, at four teen, was a plain child
whose straggling hair was drawn back from her forehead by an
indiarubber 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 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