Henry Blake Fuller

“ We are a little afraid of him, and, to tell the truth, we are a little afraid of each other."
"H'm," said Winthrop, rather grimly; "Boston goes farther than that. Some of our great lights are almost afraid of themselves."
"I've noticed," remarked Mrs. Floyd, "that there is a good deal of watching and waiting for cues—people of plain origin who are beginning to take upon themselves the forms of social organization." She spoke like a princess of the blood-royal.
"That is the point," said Fairchild. ”

“ Claudia's house had been delivered with its stairs, its windows, its red chimney, and its chandeliers—which last were composed by a pushing young draughtsman who was as anxious to make interest with Atwater as Atwater had perhaps been to make interest with Floyd.
Atwater was accustomed to people who didn't know their own minds, to people who knew their own minds too well, to people who had too many minds to really have any mind at all, and to people who had so much money that they didn't need to have any mind. ”

“ His desk was strewn with a litter of papers, and the tassels depending from his map-rack began a trembling at varying heights as Ogden closed the door behind him.
"Waugh—oo!" yawned McDowell, with his mouth at its widest. Then he let his chair down, all at once. "Oh, it's you, George, is it?"
He used the careless and patronizing freedom of a man of thirty odd to another several years his junior—of a man in business for himself to a man in business for some one else—of a man who was presently to undertake the protection and support of the other's sister. ”

“ Vibert's heel gave a vicious dig into the mosaic pavement and made a quick and rasping turn towards the exit; he crossed the court with a heavy yet rapid stride, and passed out into the street. He was quite unconscious of observation, but he had been seen.
Through the half-pane under the stairway a young woman had noted his presence and witnessed his departure. She was a thin, faded creature, in the forlorn garments of an undisguisable poverty. All but the faintest traces of good looks seemed to have been taken from her by a long experience with illness and suffering. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Never did the town of his adoption seem less, indeed, like a kindergarten than when he took his way northward to dinner, or when, later in the early evening, he made his way over to the West Side to call at the Brainards. The thousands of acres of ramshackle that made up the bulk of the city, and the tens of thousands of raw and ugly and half-built prairie that composed its environs, seemed together to constitute a great checker-board over whose squares of "section" and "township" keenness and rapacity played their daring and wary game. ”

“ He started. He blushed. "Yes, perhaps it is," he stammered. He held it awkwardly in his hand for a moment. Brower watched him curiously, yet sympathetically. "Yes," Ogden repeated, in a bold, firm voice, "it is mine." He put it in his inside pocket and buttoned his coat.
"Oh, come," cried Brower, trying to throw a veil of jocularity over his earnestness, "that isn't fair! I've got to finish it. I've got to know whether he did or didn't. Anyway, let me see the end."
"There is no end," said Ogden, soberly. "Or if there is, it has come." ”

“ His fellow—clerks noiselessly retired, and a long train of choristers slowly made their way through the long aisle the others had left vacant. Among them Vibert—tall, dark, hard, and cruel; an angel, possibly; but if so, surely one of the fallen. And a little girl of eighteen, whose blue eyes showed out from under her fluffy blond locks, and whose lips were parted in a radiant, reverent smile, steadied a trembling hand on the back of a pew and looked after him with a fond, open, and intense regard that was a perfect epitome of love. ”

“ Mrs. Bradley was a pleasant woman whose face was full of the fine lines of experience and whose hair had thinned greatly without changing its dry, sandy brown. She wore an old-fashioned tortoise-shell comb. She met Ogden here precisely as she had met him in her own house. He noticed presently that she treated everybody else in exactly the same fashion, and he learned subsequently that she had, practically, one invariable manner for all times, places, and people. ”

“ Ogden looked at her and turned his eyes away.
"I—I have never seen her before," he said. "I don't know who she is," he appeared to imply.
But he knew perfectly well who she was. He knew that she was Cecilia Ingles, and his heart was constricted by the sight of her. It is for such a woman that one man builds a Clifton and that a hundred others are martyred in it. ”

“ From the March winds, perhaps, that sweep down from Mackinaw, over the limy and choppy expanse of Lake Michigan; from the varied breezes, hot and cold, that scour the prairies on their way from scorched-up Texas or from the snow-fields beyond Manitoba.
"Not even a relative," pursued her father; "not one in all the country round—except Frances. All our people are down East," he continued, addressing Ogden more directly. "They write every so often to learn if we are millionnaires yet. We always have to say 'no,' and that discourages them. They stay where they are." ”

“ Abbie had come into the new house along with Burt and Cornelia—no great urging had now been required to induce her to abandon the house on the West Side. She led the same retired and quiet life in the one quarter that she had led in the other, save that she never felt otherwise than utterly strange and forlorn. And as she had placed herself in her brother's house, so she put a great part of her share in her father's estate into her brother's hands when ruin came and every available resource was required. She had never used much money; she may not have realized the gravity of her sacrifice. ”

“ Indeed, there is cause enough for envy in that small square of velvety Axminster, in the harmonious tinting of the walls, in the padded leather backs of the swivel chairs, in the polished brightness of the cherry desk-tops, in the fresh blotting-pads and the immaculate inkstands. To sit in this pleasant little apartment for half an hour is to receive quite a new impression of the possible luxury of business, the ultimate elegance of trade. ”

“ He turned his thumb towards the ceiling, and gave it an upward thrust that sent it through the six ceilings above it. "If you'd go up on our roof and hear them talking—"
"Oh, well," said George; "hadn't we better get something to eat?"
"And what kind of a town is it that's wanted," pursued McDowell, as he pulled down the cover of his desk, "to take up a big national enterprise and put it through with a rush? A big town, of course, but one that has grown big so fast that it hasn't had time to grow old. One with lots of youth and plenty of momentum. ”

“ Father Knickerbocker is too old, and too big and logy, and too all-fired selfish. We are the people, right here. Well, Johnny, you hold the fort," he called to a boy who was dividing an open-eyed attention between this oration and his own sandwich; "I've got to have a bite myself."
"How are you getting on downstairs?" he asked, as they tramped over the tiles of the long corridor towards the elevators. "I hear you were over at Brainard's house last night—he's a fine bird. And his son is like him. He's got another, hasn't he—a younger one? ”

“ Even many who are not adepts in the matter of house-furnishing, and who are much too rushed and preoccupied to become such, have been known to pause in their course through the Clifton's long corridors, on occasions when the ribbed glass door of the Brass Company happened to be standing ajar, and to say to themselves, with certain home offices in mind,
"Now, why can't our people do as much for us?" ”

“ No; there was only one way to settle this affair—the "business" way; and that way Brainard took—necessarily, instinctively.
He had never lived for anything but business. He had never eaten and drunk for anything but business—his family shared his farm-like fare and his primitive hours. He had never built for anything but business; though constantly investing in grounds and buildings, he had occupied his own home for fifteen years as a tenant merely, before he could bring himself to a grudging purchase. He never dressed for anything but business—he had never worn a dress-coat in his life. ”

“ The Underground is not one of the old banks, nor is it one of the large ones; if Brainard had no other irons in the fire he would not cut much of a figure in business circles. The Underground is simply one in a batch of banks that have sprung up in the last seven or eight years and that are almost unknown, even by name, to men who, in the clearing-house at that time, have since passed on to other and different affairs. It is spoken of as Brainard's bank, just as other banks are spoken of as Shayne's, or Cutter's, or Patterson's. ”

“ Chicago ranks as foremast—at present; while Boston is—"
"The mizzen-mast," completed Ogden.
"And we Chicago folks stand at the bow," chimed in his wife, "and sniff the first freshness of the breeze."
"Yes," said Winthrop, in satirical assent; "the 'Windy City.'"
"Don't abuse our wind," cried Mrs. Floyd; "we should all die like flies without it."
"That's so," assented her husband. "The wind is our only scavenger."
"I see," said Winthrop. "If you can only be big you don't mind being dirty." ”

“ The Brainard house reared itself in the same frivolous ugliness that we have already viewed; but an excess of light came through the front parlor windows, and Ogden was prepared to find that at least four of the eight burners in the big chandelier were lighted. This turned out to be the case; it was as great a tribute as the family ordinarily paid to society. The family he found represented by Brainard, his wife, and his elder daughter; society was present in the shape of a young couple who were called Mr. and Mrs. Valentine. ”

“ He was a poet—as every real-estate man should be.
We of Chicago are sometimes made to bear the reproach that the conditions of our local life draw us towards the sordid and the materialistic. Now, the most vital and typical of our human products is the real-estate agent: is he commonly found tied down by earth-bound prose?
"You fellows," said Floyd to McDowell, during one of Sister Ann's sessions, "are the greatest lot I ever struck." He spoke in a half-quizzical, half-admiring way, and showed some effort to handle the language with the Western ease and freedom of those to the manner born. ”

“ The question simply is—which one?"
"The one who would be most exposed to injury," said Ogden, with a distant mournfulness in his face and voice.
"There are different kinds of injury; there is the injury of commission, and there is the injury of omission. Sometimes the last is harder—on a woman. Why not let the victim choose her own particular woe? Why not be generous enough to give her an opportunity?"
"Not now," groaned Ogden. "You don't know. Not after all—that's happened."
"Well, then," continued Brower, with kindly perseverance, "out goes generosity. ”

“ And it's just so here."
"Quite right," said Fairchild; "we know what there is to learn, and we are determined to master it. Our Constantinoples are Berlin and London and the rest—yes, Boston, too; and all their learned exiles are flocking here to instruct us."
"And the books that are coming in!" cried Jessie Ogden. ”

“ When within a few streets of the Brainard corner he passed a house (one of a long row) on whose front steps (as with its neighbors, right and left) were camped a large and merry party, whose exaggerated domesticity made it plain that they were all fellow-boarders. They occupied two rugs as well as two chairs and a foot-stool at the head of the steps. Through their light-minded hubbub came dominatingly a voice which Ogden recognized, and he threw up his head to meet the frank but overdone bow of Cornelia McNabb. ”

“ Ogden flushed a little and took the first step towards a frown. It is not pleasant to contemplate 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 invariably fine. ”

“ Subject for debate: is it safer to marry a rich girl or a poor girl—for a young man in moderate circumstances, I mean?"
"Oh, dear," said Ogden, sitting down on the edge of the bed, helplessly; "if you're going back to that chestnut!"
"Well, it's timely," rejoined Brower, knocking the ashes of his pipe into the cover of the soap-dish; "and always will be. Pro: if the girl's rich, she'll have had things, and got used to them, and perhaps tired of them. If the girl's poor, she'll be ravenous after her long starve-out, and will expect her husband to feed her with everything." ”

“ Ragged matting in the halls, and the janitor didn't look very slick. I guess they've rented ready furnished. Mayme was real glad to see me. But he was rather grumpy, I thought."
"Everybody ought always to be glad to see you, Freddy," smiled Walworth, with a caressing irony.
"I suppose," resumed Fairchild, thoughtfully, "that the human family will always go on considering a wedding as a joyous occasion. It always has; it always must—hope springs eternal."
Ogden wondered what other view there might be to take. Everybody had seemed lively and happy enough when Kittie was married. ”

“ Another might have blown an airy bubble like this, even in the face of Brainard's ominous and taciturn frown; but Pratt was not the man to do it. He soon left the upper air of informal jocularity for the firmer ground of argument and expostulation, and this ground, before he ended, was almost pressed by the knees of entreaty.
"It's plain enough," said Brainard, at length; "he took it, and he kept it."
Each one, from his own point of view, cast his eye on the culprit. ”