With the Procession

by Henry Blake Fuller

"Well," he said, with a look of extreme distaste fixed half on his brother and half on his book-shelves, "we can accept her and make the best of her. I have seen her and her father. While I can't say I admire the personal character of either, I am not prejudiced by the fact that he is only a clerk and she only a shop-girl. They are beginners here; I am willing to believe that they were something better at home. We can accept her; we shall have to, I suppose."

Truesdale reared his beautiful brazen front and flashed on his brother a haughty and disdainful smile. "You can accept her? Will you please tell me what you mean by that? And 'better at home'!" He burst into open and derisive laughter. "What new Arcadia is this, where even the lawyers walk about with their beribboned crooks and the little baa-lambs following behind them? We have been sitting in conclave, have we, on a mossy bank in some sylvan shade, with chaplets on our brows, and we have piped and twittered over the matter, and have decided that we can 'accept her'? Well, you can do more than I can," he added, abruptly. His foot slipped from the rung of the opposite chair and fell to the bare floor with a contemptuous clump.

"You've got your own character to clear, haven't you?" asked Roger, with a severe brevity.

Truesdale replaced his foot on the rung of the other chair and slid down into his own as he thrust his hands deeper into his pockets. "Dear me," he said, in affected apprehension, "am I in any danger? Well, well; if such a thing can hurt a young man, I shall be glad to know it—I never knew it before. Now, là-bas, for example—"

He drew out one of his hands and waved it vaguely; he seemed to be conjuring up a wider and more liberal world—the only one he had learned.

"It can," insisted his brother; "it will. Both you and your family."

Truesdale's thought flashed back to Bertie Patterson and the unfinished picture. It came to him all at once that his brother might be better worth listening to than he had been disposed to concede.

"And your family," Roger repeated.

But Truesdale's thought, lingering over the picture, made little of this second point. He did scant justice to the mortification of his mother before her church-members and her few remaining neighbors, or that of his sisters within the circle which they had lately constructed for themselves. Nor did he yet realize, even with Bertie's picture in mind, the hundred checks and bars that awaited him in a society of whose primitive purity he had made a jest whenever occasion came.

"Dear Roger," he presently rejoined, in his most genial and winning voice, "you mean well, I am sure—well by me and by the family and by everybody. And I dare say you do very nicely in your own narrow field; but as for knowing life—well, really now, do you think you understand what it is to live?"