"'I shall marry Russell,' she declared."
"I shall marry Russell," she declared, "in spite of you and in spite of everything. You may say that he has no money, and that you don't know his family; and Burt may forbid him the house and go prying into his private affairs; and you may say that he has no friends and no abilities, and as much more as you please. I don't care; I shall be his wife. I won't believe any of these things, and nobody shall separate us."
She rose, flushed and frowning, and walked out firmly. Fairchild opened the opposite door and moved off quietly to his own place. Brainard brushed aside a pile of abstracts and mortgages that encumbered his desk, found an opening big enough for his elbow, and leaned over his blotting-pad with an air of utter dejection and defeat.
[IV]
On the twelfth floor of the Clifton—at the far end of a long corridor—is the office of Eugene H. McDowell, real estate.
Ogden, at the beginning of one of his brief noonings, took the elevator up to the quarters of his coming brother-in-law.
He found McDowell stretching himself violently in his swivel chair, which was tilted as far back as its mechanism would permit; his head was thrown back, too, as far as anatomical considerations would allow. His eyes would have seen the ceiling if they had not been so tight shut; his Adam's apple appeared prominently between the turned-down points of his collar. His desk was strewn with a litter of papers, and the tassels depending from his map-rack began a trembling at varying heights as Ogden closed the door behind him.
"Waugh—oo!" yawned McDowell, with his mouth at its widest. Then he let his chair down, all at once. "Oh, it's you, George, is it?"
He used the careless and patronizing freedom of a man of thirty odd to another several years his junior—of a man in business for himself to a man in business for some one else—of a man who was presently to undertake the protection and support of the other's sister.