"Well, Mr. Ogden is going to have a chance to learn all about La Salle Street!" cried Mayme Brainard, with the air of one who dreads the slightest pause in the talk. "He's going into the Bank, he tells me."
"That will do very well for six days in the week," declared the other. "How about the seventh?" she asked with a twinkling directness. "Are you an Episcopalian, or what?"
"What, I fancy. Why, in Borne, I suppose, I shall do as the Romans do. For the forenoon there are the newspapers, of course. Then for the afternoon—the races, perhaps. In the evening—well, the theatre, I should say. That's about the plan at my house."
"Well, I've never been to the theatre Sunday evening, nor any of my people. And I don't believe that many nice people do go, either. Perhaps you think that there are not any nice people in Chicago—I've heard the remark made. Well, there are, I can tell you—just as nice as anywhere. I suppose you've noticed the way the papers here have of collecting all the mean, hateful things that the whole country says about us, and making a column out of them. I dare say they think it's funny. I don't know but what it is. There's my own father, now. He reads those things right after the market-reports, and time and time again I've seen him laugh till he cried. Yet he isn't any fonder of a joke than anybody else. He says it's better to be abused and made fun of than not to be noticed at all. How does it strike you?"
She made a little moue, as she recalled one or two of these national love-taps.
"And I must say it's awful, too—the sort of news that is sent out from here—excursions and alarums, and nothing else. During the anarchist time folks down East were a good deal more scared than we were. And I remember, when I was at school, I read in the Philadelphia papers that typhoid fever was raging in Chicago. They gave the death-rate and everything. I came home as fast as I could. I expected to find the whole family dying. But they didn't know anything about it. And they took my pocket-money to pay the return fare. They were alive enough."
Ogden smiled. He saw that he was face to face with a true daughter of the West; she had never seen him before, and she might never see him again, yet she was talking to him with perfect friendliness and confidence. Equally, he was sure, was she a true daughter of Chicago; she had the one infallible local trait—she would rather talk to a stranger about her own town than about any other subject.
"I think we shall have to reform you," she went on presently, "in advance. I believe the proper place for you next Sunday would be St. Asaph's. But it's high, you understand. Come over; my cousin has room in her pew. There is a vested choir, and when you have heard Vibert's singing—"
She stopped, as if to appreciate her own daring—like a child lighting a match. Mary Brainard gave a little start and put her hand on her friend's arm, yet at the same time she blushed slightly—less, perhaps, in panic than in pride.
"—you will learn what it is that brings Mayme Brainard all the way over from Union Park twice every Sunday," were the words with which this sentence was mentally concluded. "It's like an angel," she continued aloud. "A certain kind of angel," she added to herself. "Do you sing?" "Yes, a little."