Dear Jones: You see, my mind is relaxed by the effort to build a house on the model of the one occupied by the old woman who lived in a shoe—and that variety of early English architecture is very wearing on the taste. What sort of a house is it you are going to at Shelter Island? And how long are you going to stay there?
Baby Van Rensselaer: Oh, it’s a stupid, old-fashioned place [pause]. Do you think that bride is pretty? I have been watching them ever since we left New York. They have been to town on their wedding-trip.
Dear Jones: She is ratherish pretty. And he’s a shrewd fellow and likely to get on. I shouldn’t wonder if he was the chief wire-puller of his “deestrick.”
Baby Van Rensselaer: A village Hampden?
Dear Jones: Some day he’ll withstand the little tyrant of the fields and lead a revolt against the garden-sass monopoly, and so sail into the legislature. I fear the bride is destined to ruin her digestion in an Albany boarding-house, while the groom gives his days and nights to affairs of state.
Here the train slackened its speed as it approached a small station from which shrill notes of music arose.
Baby Van Rensselaer: Look, the bride is going to leave us.
Dear Jones: He lives here, and the local fife and drum corps have come to welcome him home. Dinna ye hear that strident “Hail to the Chief,” they have just executed?
Baby Van Rensselaer: How proudly she looks up at him! I think the band ought to play something for her—but they are men, and they’ll never think of it.