"After? Oh, then circumstances depend on the girl."
"H'm! Can't lay down any general law—same as with little Johnny. Pshaw! You go to the foot."
But they both agreed on one point, as young men always do when they discuss this standard subject: they stood together on the assumption that such a venture concerned only the two people primarily involved.
Brower preceded Ogden into the hallway; he stood with the toe of one slipper on the heel of the other. "Well, remember me to the swells."
"Oh, shucks!" said George, turning back and laughing.
He walked down and out rather sedately, and picked his way over the muddy sidewalks with his thoughts fixed on the two recent marriages. That in his own family had just occurred under such disadvantages as must prevail in a disorganized household, and with the infliction of such discomforts as will sometimes be undergone by people who, while not in society, still feel impelled to have such a function proceed after the fashion that society prescribes. Kittie Ogden was duly married, then, with a certain regard to cards, carriages, caterers, and the rest; and the feast was graced by a number of McDowell's family and friends—people of a fairish sort, who called for little comment in either way. At least, little comment was bestowed by Ogden, whose principal thought was that his sister was now the wife of a fellow of some means and ability, and who felt that it would not come amiss to have a good business man in the family.
At the Floyds' he found the other wedding the subject of much comment, more or less discreet. On the other hand, the affair in his own family received but a mere civil mention; the Ogdens, he felt, must be only an insignificant little group, after all. Must they—must he—always remain so?
The Floyds occupied a snug little house which filled a chink between two bigger and finer ones, and commanded a view of the back yard of a third, which was bigger and finer still. Mrs. Floyd had lately begun to fill a chink in the social world as well, by having an "evening." She had approached the idea with a good deal of deliberation, and she had achieved something very small and quiet. She overcame her husband's weakness for knowing people and inviting them to the house; she was not after a deluge, but a drop; and if her tardy distillation did not equal the perfumes of the fragrant East, still it was the best result to be arrived at under the circumstances.
He found the Fairchilds there, and he came upon Fairchild and Floyd smoking, sub rosa, in a secluded corner of the library, which was furnished in a sombre and solid fashion. In the Floyd family the household divinity was the lace-curtain, whose susceptibility to offence from the fumes of tobacco is well known; her high-priestess was Mrs. Floyd, and her chief victim was Walworth. Associated with the two smokers was young Freddy Pratt, whose solicitude regarding Brainard's mental state on the occasion of his daughter's call at the bank has been already touched upon, and who was now puffing a cigarette with a learned and expert air. This attitude was displeasing to Ogden, who was perhaps over-disposed to feel official differences on social occasions; but no oppressive sense of his own subordinate rank troubled Freddy Pratt, who had but a feeble and intermittent realization of the orders of the business hierarchy, or indeed of anything else.
"It was a matter that concerned just her and him," Fairchild was saying as Ogden entered, with a contemplative regard fastened on the lengthening ash of his cigar. "It was nobody else's business."