“I can’t dodge. Thurlow will meet the Follansbees when they arrive, and the first thing he will tell them—oh, pot! don’t you see that I’m in for it up to my neck?”
Philip tossed his cold pipe aside and got out of his chair.
“Better go to bed and sleep on it,” he counselled. “Perhaps it won’t seem so much like an unmixed misfortune in the morning.” And as he reached his bed-room door: “This Miss Follansbee—is she good-looking, Harry?”
“A glorious blonde, handsome enough to make your hair curl.”
“Humph!” said Philip; “it strikes me you might be a lot worse off than you are. You might have epilepsy, or rheumatism, or small-pox, or something of that sort. Good-night.” And he went off to bed.
XV
Exuberant Denverites of the early ’eighties—not the bull-team pioneers of the ’sixties, most of whom looked on with dry humor, but the clamant majority of tenderfoot later comers—lived strenuously in a boosters’ Paradise, acclaiming their city the Queen of the Plains and extolling impartially its Italian skies, health-giving atmosphere and matchless scenic surroundings; its phenomenal growth, wealth and hilarious “wide-openness.”
To this trumpeting mother of mining-camps came the Follansbees, fresh from an America which was slow to concede an America west of the Alleghenies; the judge, a fine, upstanding gentleman of the old school, with silvering hair and beard; his wife, an ample and gracious lady corseted to the moment and expert in the use of fan and lorgnette; their son Thomas, a spectacled young man who had had a post-graduate year at Oxford, returning with a pronounced English accent and as the introducer of the curious English custom of wearing spats; an elder daughter fully bearing out Bromley’s description of her as a “glorious blonde,” and a younger, thin and pale, with wistful eyes looking out upon a world which would always be alien to them.
True to his traditions, Bromley joined Thurlow in meeting the migrants-for-health’s-sake at the Union Depot, saw them carriaged for their hotel, saw to the transfer of their luggage, and afterward called at the hotel, dutifully and at the proper hour, to pay his respects and to place himself, as a somewhat seasoned Denverite, at the service of the family in helping to find summer quarters in which the invalid Lucy Ann could have the benefits to be derived from the miracle-working climate.
“Their reactions to the ‘wild and woolly’ are delightful to behold,” Bromley told Philip that night at dinner. “The judge and Lucy Ann take things as they are; but Mrs. Aurelia and Tom and Eugie are distinctly disappointed at finding themselves surrounded by all the comforts and most of the luxuries of civilization. I don’t know just what they were expecting to find, but they evidently haven’t found it—yet.”