The visitor, thus urged, sank back into the chair from which he had just risen. He was a slender young man, of good height, and his age was perhaps twenty-four. His complexion was of the colorless kind that good health alone keeps from sallowness. His hair was a light brown and fine and thick, and it fell across his temples in the two smooth wings that were made by an accurate parting in the middle. He had the beginnings of a shadowy little moustache, and a pair of good eyes which expressed a fair amount of self-reliance and any amount of hope.
"And how are you finding the West Side?" Walworth pursued. "I don't know much about it myself. This is a big town and awfully cut up. A man has to pick out his own quarter and stick to it. If you move from one side of the river to another, you bid good-by to all your old friends; you never see them again. You said you were somewhere near Union Park, I believe?"
"Yes," George Ogden answered, "I have landed in a pretty good place, and I want to stay there if I can. They're a sort of farming people —or were, to start with. They came from New York State, I believe, and haven't been here but a year or two. Is there anybody in this town who hasn't come from somewhere else, or who has been here more than a year or two?"
Walworth laughed. "I haven't. But you go around some, and you may find a few that have."
"The mother cooks, the father markets, the daughter helps to wait on table. Nice, friendly people; make me think of those at home." He smiled a little wistfully. "About the only people so far that do."
"Well, I have heard that there are some pretty good streets over there," is Walworth's vague response.
"Ours is. We have trees—all of one sort and planted regularly, I mean. And ornamental lamp-posts. And I'm only a block from the Park. Everything seems all right enough."
"I dare say; but don't you find it rather far away from—?" queried Floyd, with a sort of insinuating intentness.
However, I have no idea of reproducing Walworth's remarks on the local topography. They were voluminous, but he would be found prejudiced and but partly informed. Besides, his little tirade was presently thrown out of joint by a dislocating interruption.
Walworth always experienced a mental dislocation, slight or serious, whenever his wife called at the office. Nor were matters much helped when his wife was accompanied by her sister. It was the latter of these who now opened the door with an assured hand and who shut it after the two of them with a confirmatory slam.