"I hope she's a spendthrift," shrugged Mr. Schaeffer. "It would give Dan Leitzel the shock he needs to find himself married to a spendthrift."
"She won't be one after she's Mrs. Daniel Leitzel!" Miss Deibert confidently asserted.
"But of course she's rich—Dan Leitzel wouldn't marry a dowerless woman," said Bleichert.
"Well, then he won't let her spend her money," Miss Deibert settled that.
The second young lady at this card table, a pale, serious-looking girl, did not join in the discussion, but sat with her eyes downcast, toying with her food, as the rest chattered. The other three did not give Miss Aucker credit for remaining silent because she found their gossip vulgar and tiresome (which was indeed her true reason) but attributed her disinclination to talk to the fact that during the past year Daniel Leitzel had been rather noticeably attentive to her; so much so that people had begun to look for a possible interesting outcome. Miss Deibert, Mr. Schaeffer, and Mr. Bleichert, therefore, all considered her demeanour just now to be an indelicately open expression of her chagrin at the news they discussed.
"He was her last chance," Miss Deibert was thinking. "She must be nearly thirty."
"One would think she wouldn't show her disappointment so frankly," Mr. Schaeffer was mentally criticising her.
"You know," chuckled Miss Deibert as she dabbed with her fork at a chicken croquet, "Danny, away from his sisters and his awful house and among strangers, would appear so like a perfect gentleman, even if he is 'a rat, a weasel, a money-slot,' that I think even the descendant of earls or governors might be deceived. You see he's had so many advantages; he was only ten years old when they discovered coal on their land and got rich over night. And from the first, his sisters gave him every advantage they could buy for him, sending him to the best private schools, and then to college, and then to the Harvard Law School; and every one knows that Danny Leitzel is no fool, but a brilliant lawyer. So I do think that, detached from his setting here, there's nothing about Danny that would lead an unsuspecting South Carolina bride to imagine such contingencies as Jennie and Sadie and that Main Street house. I suppose she lives in an ancestral colonial place full of antique mahogany, the kind we all buy at junk shops when we have money enough."
"What kind of a woman would it be that could stand Dan Leitzel's penuriousness?" Mr. Schaeffer speculated. "He makes money like rolling down hill and I've heard him jew down the old chore woman that scrubs his office and haggle over a fifty-cent bill for supper at the club. He's the worst screw I ever knew. And mind you, his bride's a Southern woman, accustomed to liberality and gallantry and everything she won't find at Danny's house!"
"Do you know (not many people in New Munich do seem to know) that the Leitzels' mother is living?" said Miss Deibert.