"Sit down." He motioned Ogden to a chair which stood close to the window—a window that looked out on the court and that commanded the multifarious panorama of daily business going on behind the ranks and rows of great glass sheets which formed the other three sides of the enclosure—the ends of over-crowded desks, the digital dumb-show of stenographers, the careful handling by shirt-sleeved clerks of the damp yellow sheets in copying-books, the shaking fingers and nodding heads that accompanied the persuasion and expostulation of personal interviews.
McDowell presented a physiognomy that seemed to have been stripped of all superfluities. He contrived to avoid the effect of absolute leanness, yet he was without a spare ounce of flesh. His cheek-bones did not obtrude themselves, nor were his finger-joints unduly prominent; yet his trousers seemed more satisfactory as trousers than his legs as legs, and his feet were in long, narrow, thin-soled shoes, through whose flexible leather one almost divined the articulations of his toes. His hair had shrunk back from his forehead and temples, but his moustache sprang out as boldly and decidedly as if constructed of steel wires. His nose was sharp; his eyes were like two gimlets. The effect of his presence was nervous, excitant, dry to aridity. He had a flattish chest and bony shoulders; his was an earthly tabernacle that gave its tailor considerable cause for study.
"Tour friends called again this morning," he began, folding up two or three documents and thrusting them into the pigeon-holes before him. "We have had quite a session. But they're fixed finally. Does that cousin of theirs live with them?"
"Cousin? Isn't she their sister—sister-in-law?"
"I mean the other one; Miss—Bradley, isn't it?"
"Oh! Well, no; she comes in and stays with them a week now and then. But her people live in Hinsdale."
"Hinsdale; nice country around there. Seems as if you just had to get outside of Cook County to find anything hilly or even rolling. I'd like to take it up first rate. The minute you are over the county line you get clean out of all that flat land and everything's up and down—like around Worcester. But I don't believe they save much on taxes."
He tore some pencilled memoranda off the top of a pad and threw them into the waste-basket.
"Yes, the sister-in-law was here, all right enough. She's a pretty smart woman, too; got a good deal more head than any of the rest of them. She's striking out a little late, but she may make something of herself yet.
"But she wants to get that poetical streak out of her," he went on. "What was it she said, now? Oh, yes; all this down-town racket came to her like the music of a battle-hymn. Our hustling, it seems, resembles a hand-to-hand combat from street to street—she lugged in mediaeval Florence. And to finish up with, she told me I was like a gladiator stripped for the fray." He ran his hand down the stripes of his handsome trousers. "What did she mean by that? Was it some of her Boston literary business?"