HER HUSBAND'S PURSE
I
The Pennsylvania town of New Munich was electrified by the sudden and entirely unlooked-for announcement of the betrothal of Daniel Leitzel, Esquire; but his two maiden sisters with whom he lived, and to whom the news was also wholly unexpected, were appalled, confounded. That Danny should have taken such a step independently of them (who did all his thinking for him outside of his profession) was a cataclysmal episode. Of course it never would have happened without their knowledge if Danny had not been temporarily away from his home on business and far removed from their watchful care—watchful these twenty years past that no designing Jezebel might get a chance at the great fortune of their petted little brother—though it must be admitted that Danny was by this time of a marriageable age, being just turned forty-five.
"To think he'd leave us learn about it in the newspapers yet, sooner 'n he'd come home and face us with it! Yes, it looks anyhow as if he was ashamed of the girl he's picked out!" exclaimed Jennie, a stern and uncompromising spinster of sixty, as she and her sister Sadie, sitting in the elaborately furnished and quite hideous sitting-room of their big, fine house on Main Street, stared in consternation at the glaring headlines of the New Munich Evening Intelligencer, which announced, in type that to the sisters seemed letters of flame, the upsetting news of their idolized brother having been at last matrimonially trapped. Being confronted with his betrothal in print seemed to make it hopelessly incontrovertible. They might have schemed to avert the impending catastrophe of his marriage (in case Danny had been taken in by an Adventuress) did not the Intelligencer unequivocally state (and the Intelligencer's statements were scarcely less authoritative to Jennie and Sadie Leitzel than the Bible itself) that Danny would be married to the Unknown inside of a month. If the Intelligencer said so, it seemed useless to try to stop it.
"To think he'll be married to her already before we get a chance, once, to look her over and tell him if she'd suit him!" lamented Sadie who was five years younger than Jennie.
"Well," pronounced Jennie, setting her thin lips in a hard line, "she'll find out when she gets here that she ain't getting her fingers on our Danny's money! She'll get fooled if she's counting on that. She'll soon learn that she'll have to do with just what he likes to give her and no more! And of course Danny'll consult us as to just how much he ought to leave her handle. When she finds out," Jennie grimly prophesied, "that our Danny always does the way we advise him to and that she'll have to keep on the right side of us, I guess she won't like it very well!"
"We can only hope that she ain't such a bold, common thing that just took our Danny in, that way!" sighed Sadie.