"No ac—oh, I see. We've changed banks, and I forgot to change the name in the check." He picked up a ruler and drew the red-ink-bottle a little nearer. "I'll fix it. Sorry to have troubled you. We want to look out for this, Joseph."
Vibert withdrew, speaking the words that Ogden had heard on his entrance—words that would have been the reverse of assuring if he had fully understood them. "Bad egg," said McDowell to him, wagging his head in the direction of the just closed door.
George looked at him studiously. He appeared to be in a state of extreme nervous irritation. His wiry moustache moved up and down stiffly as he felt about with, his teeth for the inner membrane of his lips. His long, lean fingers were interlaced, and a clicking sound came from his snapping his finger-nails together. It was clearly no occasion for more than a partial statement of Ogden's matter, and this was the most that he permitted himself.
But McDowell was in the sensitive state of mind when one word does the work of three, and in the irritable state of mind when talk is such a relief that three words evoke thirty in reply. He met George's brief and modest suggestions with a hitching of his shoulders, and answered them in a harsh and strident tone.
"The first thing in doing business," he said, "is to have an office to do it in." He looked about his own—his desks, his cashier's window, his letter-press. "And the second is to know how to do it." He looked out of the window in a wholly impersonal way, but his words had a more personal slant than he would have given them at almost any other time. "Gad knows I've got enough to do already, but Kittie's affairs are mine. She has equal interests with the others, and she seems to feel that I am able and willing to look after them."
He spoke with some show of reason, and George was obliged so to concede.
"There's taxes, for one thing. Or, take special assessments alone; they're almost a business by themselves. Say you've got ten acres or so just beyond the limits. Some fine day it's six hundred dollars or more for half a mile of side-walk—a sidewalk that won't be walked on by seven people a week. What's the reason? Oh, some one of those township politicians or other has got a friend that's a carpenter. Now, who's going to tackle the boards and stave off such things?"
George looked at him silently.
"There's tax-sales—I guess you never went to one of them. You'd strike a bloodthirsty crew if you did. Supposing you've got a mortgage, and the mortgager don't come to time with his taxes? You've got to buy 'em up to protect yourself. And you've got to get there first. Last year I fought this point for a week with one of those tax-sharks. And so it goes. Real estate is no kindergarten business, I can tell you."
The truth of this view was becoming more and more apparent to Ogden. He withdrew, after some further parleyings, in a confused and inconclusive state of mind—well convinced, however, of McDowell's abilities and more fully conscious of McDowell's position as the husband of his father's daughter. Never did the town of his adoption seem less, indeed, like a kindergarten than when he took his way northward to dinner, or when, later in the early evening, he made his way over to the West Side to call at the Brainards. The thousands of acres of ramshackle that made up the bulk of the city, and the tens of thousands of raw and ugly and half-built prairie that composed its environs, seemed together to constitute a great checker-board over whose squares of "section" and "township" keenness and rapacity played their daring and wary game. And through the middle of the board ran a line, a hinge, a crack—the same line that loomed up in ad those various deeds and abstracts of his with the portentousness and unescapability of the equator—the "line of the third principal meridian."