"I shall do my best, sir, to make her happy all her life!" the young man stammered.
"I know you will, my boy, and I think you will succeed, if she loves you as you say she does."
Then the Colonel took his hat from the nail behind the door, and the two men continued their conversation in the street. They did not turn up town to the club and residence quarter, but descended towards the river, passing on their way the massive skeleton of the ten-story building that was to house, when completed, the Parrott and Price business. It rose in the smoky sunset, stretching out spidery tendons of steel to the heavens, and from its interior came a mighty clangor. The Colonel paused to look at the new building—the monument of his success as a merchant.
"Pretty good? Corbin's doing it—he's the best in the country, they tell me."
Soon they kept on past the new building into an old quarter of the city, the Colonel apparently having some purpose that guided his devious course through these unattractive streets.
"There!" he exclaimed at last, pointing across a dirty street to a shabby little brick house. "That's the place where Isabelle's mother and I started in St. Louis. We had a couple of rooms over there the first winter. The store was just a block further west. It's torn down now. I passed some of the best days of my life in those rooms on the second story. … It isn't the outside that counts, my boy!" The Colonel tucked his hand beneath the young man's arm, as they turned back to the newer quarters of the city.
Mrs. Price, it should be said, did not accept Lane's suit as easily as the Colonel. Her imagination had been expanded by that winter in Washington, and though she was glad that Isabelle had not accepted any of "those foreigners," yet Harmony Price had very definite ideas of the position that the Colonel's daughter might aspire to in America. … But her objections could not stand before the Colonel's flat consent and Isabelle's decision.
"They'll be a great deal better off than we were," her husband reminded her.
"That's no reason why Belle should have to start where we did, or anywhere near it!" his wife retorted. What one generation had been able to gain in the social fight, it seemed to her only natural that the next should at least hold.
The Colonel gave the couple their new home in Torso, selecting, with a fine eye for real estate values, a large "colonial" wooden house with ample grounds out beyond the smoke of the little city, near the new country club. Mrs. Price spent an exciting three months running back and forth between New York, St. Louis, and Torso furnishing the new home. Isabelle's liberal allowance was to continue indefinitely, and beyond this the Colonel promised nothing, now or later; nor would Lane have accepted more from his hand. It was to the Torso house that the Lanes went immediately after their month in the Adirondacks.
* * * * *
Torso, Indiana, is one of those towns in the Mississippi Valley which makes more impression the farther from New York one travels. New York has never heard of it, except as it appears occasionally on a hotel register among other queer places that Americans confess to as home. At Pittsburg it is a round black spot on the map, in the main ganglia of the great A. and P. and the junction point of two other railroads. At Cincinnati it is a commercial centre of considerable importance, almost a rival. While Torso to Torso is the coming pivot of the universe.
It is an old settlement—some families with French names still own the large distilleries—on the clay banks of a sluggish creek in the southern part of the state, and there are many Kentuckians in its population. Nourished by railroads, a division headquarters of the great A. and P., near the soft-coal beds, with a tin-plate factory, a carpet factory, a carriage factory, and a dozen other mills and factories, Torso is a black smudge in a flat green landscape from which many lines of electric railway radiate forth along the country roads. And along the same roads across the reaches of prairie, over the swelling hills, stalk towering poles, bearing many fine wires glistening in the sunlight and singing the importance of Torso to the world at large.
The Lanes arrived at night, and to Isabelle the prairie heavens seemed dark and far away, the long broad streets with their bushy maple trees empty, and the air filled with hoarse plaints, the rumbling speech of the railroad. She was homesick and fearful, as they mounted the steps to the new house and pushed open the shining oak door that stuck and smelled of varnish. The next morning Lane whisked off on a trolley to the A. and P. offices, while Isabelle walked around the house, which faced the main northern artery of Torso. From the western veranda she could see the roof of the new country club through a ragged group of trees. On the other side were dotted the ample houses of Torso aristocracy, similar to hers, as she knew, finished in hard wood, electric-lighted, telephoned, with many baths, large "picture" windows of plate glass, with potted ferns in them, and much the same furniture—wholesome, comfortable "homes." Isabelle, turning back to her house to cope with the three Swedes that her mother had sent on from St. Louis, had a queer sense of anti-climax. She swept the landscape with a critical eye, feeling she knew it all, even to what the people were saying at this moment in those large American-Georgian mansions; what Torso was doing at this moment in its main street. … No, it could not be for the Lanes for long—that was the conviction in her heart. Their destiny would be larger, fuller than any to be found in Torso. Just what she meant by a "large, full life," she had never stopped to set down; but she was sure it was not to be found here in Torso.
Here began, however, the routine of her married life. Each morning she watched her husband walk down the broad avenue to the electric car—alert, strong, waving his newspaper to her as he turned the corner. Each afternoon she waited for him at the same place, or drove down to the office with the Kentucky horses that she had bought, to take him for a drive before dinner. He greeted her each time with the same satisfied smile, apparently not wilted by the long hours in a hot office. There was a smudged, work-a-day appearance to his face and linen, the mark of Torso, the same mark that the mill-hands across the street from the A. and P. offices brought home to their wives. … Thus the long summer days dragged. For distraction there was a mutiny in the crew of Swedish servants, but Isabelle, with her mother's instinct for domestic management, quickly produced order, in spite of the completely servantless state of Torso. She would telegraph to St. Louis for what she wanted and somehow always got it. The house ran—that was her business. It was pretty and attractive—that was also her business. But this woman's work she tossed off quickly. Then what? She pottered in the garden a little, but when the hot blasts of prairie heat in mid-August had shrivelled all the vines and flowers and cooked the beds into slabs of clay, she retired from the garden and sent to St. Louis for the daily flowers. She read a good deal, almost always novels, in the vague belief that she was "keeping up" with modern literature, and she played at translating some German lyrics.
Then people began to call—the wives of the Torso great, her neighbors in those ample mansions scattered all about the prairie. These she reported to John with a mocking sense of their oddity.
"Mrs. Fraser came to-day. What is she? Tin-plate or coal?"
"He's the most important banker here," her husband explained seriously.
"Oh—well, she asked me to join the 'travel-class.' They are going through the Holy Land. What do you suppose a 'travel-class' is?" …
Again it was the wife of the chief coal operator, Freke, "who wanted me to know that she always got her clothes from New York." She added gently, "I think she wished to find out if we are fit for Torso society. I did my best to give her the impression we were beneath it." …
These people, all the "society" of Torso, they met also at the country club, where they went Sundays for a game of golf, which Lane was learning. The wife of the A. and P. superintendent could not be ignored by Torso, and so in spite of Isabelle's efforts there was forming around her a social life. But the objective point of the day remained John—his going and coming.
"Busy day?" she would ask when he bent to kiss her.
"They're