"Do you think Danny could be so easy worked?" Sadie doubtfully inquired.
"He's a man," Jennie affirmed conclusively (though there were those among Danny's acquaintances who would not have agreed with Jennie); "and any man can be worked."
"You think?"
"To be sure. Danny would have been roped in long ago a'ready if I hadn't of opened his eyes to it, still, when he was being worked."
"Yes, I guess," agreed Sadie. "Say, Jennie, what'll Hiram say when he hears it, I wonder!"
Hiram was their brother next in age to Jennie, who, upon the family's sudden, unexpected access to wealth thirty-five years before, through the discovery of coal on some farm land they owned, had been a young farmer working in the fields, and had immediately decided to use his share of the money obtained from leasing the coal land to prepare himself for what had then seemed to him a dizzy height of ambition, the highest human calling, the United Brethren ministry. For twenty years now he had been pastor of a small church in the neighbouring borough of Millerstown. His sisters were very proud to have a brother who was "a preacher." It was so respectable. They never failed to feel a thrill at sight of his printed name in an occasional number of the Millerstown New Era—"Rev. Hiram Leitzel." But Hiram did not, of course, hold Danny's high place in their regard; Danny, their little brother whom they had reared and who had repaid them by such a successful career in money-making that he had, at the age of forty-five, accumulated a fortune many times larger than that he had inherited.
"Hiram will take it awful hard that Danny's getting married," affirmed Jennie. "He'd like you and me an Danny, too, to will our money to his children. He always hoped, I think, that Danny wouldn't ever get married, so's his children would get all. To be sure the ministry ain't a money-making calling and Hiram has jealous feelings over Danny that he's so rich and keeps getting richer. Hiram likes money, too, as much as Danny does."
"I wonder," speculated Sadie, "if Danny's picked out as saving and hard-working a wife as what Hiram's got."
The characteristic Leitzel caution that Hiram had exercised in "picking out" a wife had prolonged his bachelorhood far into middle life. He had now been married ten years and had four children.
Keenly as the Leitzels loved money, none of them, not even Hiram himself, had ever regretted his going into the ministry. It gave him the kind of importance in the little borough of Millerstown that was manna to the Leitzel egotism. Hiram really thought of himself (as in his youth he had always looked upon ministers) as a kind of demigod; and as the people of Millerstown and even his own wife treated him as though he were one, he lived in the complacent enjoyment of his delusion.