"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 Ogden, 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 seriousness 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 knew that the cook was sometimes impertinent, and that the market-man now and then forgot to send the white-fish. He himself was a mere boarding bachelor, yet he had come to learn something of the relief which follows the shifting of a housekeeper's cares to the shoulders of the housekeeper's husband. Ferguson had relieved the tedium of many a half-hour by short-handing bits of dialogue that accompanied connubial spats between his employer and his employer's wife.
These signs and tokens were not lost on Ogden; he rose again to go. You were they lost on Floyd himself, whose apprehension of a bad quarter of an hour was heightened by the absence, as yet, of any exact data. He had no wish to hold the field alone, and he begged Ogden not to hurry his departure.
"Where are the girls?" he asked his wife. "I thought you said they came along with you."
"They did. They are in the building. They will be up in a few minutes. That child!—somebody ought to look after her."
"Then why not wait a little while?" Floyd suggested to Ogden. "My wife's affair won't take long. Ferguson, won't you just clear off that chair out there and find the paper? And now, what is it?" he asked the two women when they were left together.
II
"Well, Ann has heard from those Minneapolis people again. And she isn't any nearer making up her mind than before."
"Here's what they say," added his sister-in-law. She took a letter out of her bag and handed it to him.
"Oh!" said Walworth. He felt half relieved, half vexed.
His wife stood by the window, rubbing her forefinger along the edges of its silver lettering.
"I don't see whatever put Minneapolis into Ann's head. There seems to be a plenty of buildings right here."
She looked at the rough brick back of a towering structure a few hundred feet away, and at the huddle of lower roofs between. From a skylight on one of these a sunbeam came reflected, and compelled her to move.
"And plenty of dirt, too, if she is after real estate; plenty to be sold, and plenty of people to sell it. I never saw a town where it was more plentiful."
She glanced downwards at the wagons and cars that were splashing through the streets after a rainy September night. "Why shouldn't there be more people to shovel it, too? You see their signs stuck up everywhere—the dealers, I mean."
"Ann can get to Minneapolis in thirteen hours," suggested Walworth, passing the end of his thumb along one of his eyebrows. "What's that, after the trip West? And then she can see for herself. You take the cars here late in the afternoon, and you get there in time for breakfast."
"I believe I'd just let it drop," said Miss Wilde, "if I happened to know positively of any good thing here. They write a nice enough letter, but I can't tell what state the building is in unless I see it. And I'm merely taking their word that the ground is worth a hundred and fifty. There's forty feet. I wonder if 'all improvements in' means that the street is paved."
"Drop it, anyway," said her sister, as if she were disembarrassing herself of some loathsome parcel. "Look around in Chicago itself. You can see what you are buying, then. Even if you do invest here, you are not compelled to live here." She became almost rigid in her disdain.
"Ah—um!" murmured Walworth, in a noncommittal way.
The door opened suddenly, and two young girls entered in a brisk fashion. The first one had a slight figure, a little above the average height. To-day people called her slender; six or eight years later they would be likely to call her lean. She had long, thin arras, and delicate, transparent hands. She had large eyes of a deep blue, and the veins were plainly outlined on her pale temples. She had a bright face and a lively manner, and seemed to be one who drew largely on her nervous force without making deposits to keep up her account. Her costume was such as to give one the idea that dress was an important matter with her.
"Well, Frankie!" she called to Mrs. Floyd, "you found your way here all right, did you? You're a clever little body! Or did Miss Wilde help you?"
Mrs. Floyd passed back the Minneapolis letter to her sister and bestowed a lady-like frown on the new-comers. She disliked to be called "Frankie," but what is to be done between cousins?
"Jessie!" she expostulated softly, indicating Ogden in the adjoining room.
"You can't think," the girl went on, to Ogden redux, "how proud my cousin is of her ignorance of Chicago. She knows where to buy 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 I 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!"
"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 Mayme—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 window-sills. Then she turned back to her questioner, with eyes that were steady and perhaps a bit defiant.
"Well, we stopped for a minute in that insurance 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 cousin 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