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