He was at once struck by her peculiar facial expression; she had one eye open and the other shut. All at once she effected an instantaneous change which closed the open eye and opened the closed one. Then she opened both and gave out a smile of recognition, surprise, and pleasure, which he now perceived to be the work of the features of Cornelia McNabb.
"Here we are!" she seemed to say.
She had followed Burt's elevation to the vice-presidency, along with the new desk and the handsome rail-work enclosing it. Burt's concerns, despite his rise in rank, were now, as heretofore, largely outside the hank proper; he did something in stocks now and then, and he kept the run of things on the Board of Trade. But he was like his father in looking upon the bank as a personal and family matter—a point of view which the action of the body of stockholders somewhat justified: as a general thing they made up a chorus that huddled in the wings—several of them declining to come "on" even for the election that advanced Brainard, Jr., to the second place. So he saw no very good reason why the bank generally should not foot the bill for his own clerk-hire.
"Why can't you use the man we've got here already?" his father had asked him, however. "Ain't one enough?"
"No. Somebody else has always got him. If I could have one for myself just for an hour or so, it would be a great help."
"Why don't you get one of those girls that circulate around upstairs? I hear there's one or two of 'em."
"I believe I will." And thus Cornelia McNabb came in for a brief daily attachment to the Underground.
She sat in her place quite unoccupied for an hour or so, looking about inquiringly, fidgeting a little, and watching the clock. Ogden glanced over in her direction once or twice. He saw that she had contrived to express her rise by several subtile alterations in her dress, and that she had succeeded in enveloping herself in a promising atmosphere of gentility. She, in her turn, kept an eye on him and contrived to time her own luncheon along with his. She thrust her hat-pin into place just as he buttoned on his cuffs, and she drew a black-dotted veil across the tip of her nose just as he was reaching up for his hat.
They sauntered out separately, but came together in the hallway.
"Do I look nice, or don't I?" she asked him, as she passed one of her gloves over the smooth surface of the massive marble balustrade. "You needn't think the Pewaukee girls are jays; they're too near Lakeside and Waukesha for that."