The photographs stood in the position in which he had first placed them a month and a half ago, although the recent arrival of several of the originals had given their shadows an altered importance. Everybody knows of the inertia that overtakes decorative detail, even when portable. There were the pictures of his father and his mother, arranged in a pair. His father offered a placid, gray-bearded face; it seemed rather forceless, though that effect may have been due to retouching; yet, independent of any practical processes, it was the face of a man who obviously could not have risen in advance to any adequate conception of the Western metropolis.
The face of his mother was serious, strenuous. She had in some degree the semi-countrified aspect of one who has run a quiet course in a quiet quarter of a minor town.
His sister's picture had been taken in the East just before her starting for her new home. It was now in the hands of Ogden's next-door neighbor, who had come in carrying a choice of white ties, and who now wove around it a contemplative cloud of tobacco-smoke from his briar-wood pipe. He was a young man with a high forehead and a pair of shrewd but kindly brown eyes.
"A mighty pretty girl," Brower said, heartily. "Get the right kind of a New England face, and you can't do much better. I must haul out my own photographs and fix them up some time."
Brower kept his collection in his trunk, along with his shirts and underwear generally. He used his bureau drawers for collars and cuffs, and for a growing accumulation of newspapers, magazines, and novels. He had been in the house two years, yet his trunk had never been unpacked and put away. He was an adjuster for an insurance company, and was subject to sudden calls to remote localities, in accordance with the doings of the busy monster that the press knows as the "fire fiend." If Isaac Sobrinski, off in Des Moines, had the misfortune to be burned out, at the close of a dull season or in the face of brisk and successful competition, then Des Moines was the place to which Brower immediately posted. He estimated the damage on the building, figured the salvage on socks and ulsters, and endeavored to decide, so far as lay in his powers, whether the catastrophe had been inflicted by Providence or had been precipitated by Sobrinski's own match-box. However, he never carried anything except his valise on such excursions; the general state of his trunk is to be accepted simply as the mental index of a constant and hurried traveller.
"Yes, she's a mighty pretty girl," he repeated, thoughtfully. "Where have they gone?"
"Oh, not far. There's been a good deal of travelling done already. They just went up to Milwaukee; Eugene had something to see about there. They'll be back to-morrow, I expect."
"Milwaukee, eh? That's come to be quite the fashion, hasn't it? Some folks go there after they're married, and some of them to be married. We had one in our office a week or two ago; Vibert—have you met him?"
"It's in your office he is, then, is it? No, I've never met him. I've seen him and heard about him. Is he much thought of?"
"Well, the office doesn't have a great deal to say to a man as long as he keeps hours and attends to his work—when the position isn't responsible, I mean. What are you looking for—whisk-broom? Here; I'm sitting on it, I guess."