"Yes, that is the best thing to do," he said. "To think," he added, with a tender seriousness, "that you might have saved me from them—from every one!"
They were married within a month, and they began their married life in the same house in which he had begun his Western life as a bachelor. Mrs. Gore's kindliness still survived, after the hard rubs of three years of city life, and she spread her sympathetic interest over her new couple with an unstinted hand.
"She pressed him back into the depths of his great easy chair."
Their wedding involved no social celebration, unless we note their participation in one of a series of great public functions that sometimes mark the early winter. This took place in a vast hall that was luminous in ivory and gold. They sat before a wide curved frame brilliant with a myriad points of light, and listened to the united endeavors of many voices and instruments to please the four thousand people about them. Ogden and his wife had taken places in the balcony. They had toned down existence to a quiet gray; they recognized the middlingness of their lot. Cornelia and her husband, unknown to the Ogdens, had seats on the floor beneath.
One box in the two long, parallel rows remained vacant during the first and second acts. As the prelude to the third act began among the violins the box was claimed. A party of four entered.
"There she is," said Cornelia to herself, in her place on the main floor. "Just you wait. Burt's smart and I'm careful, and we shall catch up to you yet!"
"Who are those people?" asked Abbie, turning towards her husband. "Who is the gentleman with gray hair?" She was beginning to admire her husband's own.
The two ladies of the party had seated themselves; the two gentlemen were busy with their own and their companions' wraps in the back of the box.