With the Procession

by Henry Blake Fuller

Among the first in his new batch were Theodore Brower and Arthur Paston. They were both older than he, but he declared, net, that his non-travelled compatriots of his own age were impossible. These two new acquaintances he appeared to like equally well; and Jane, whose kindling ambition had devoted her brother to a brilliant social career, and whose forenoon with Mrs. Bates had done little enough to quench the mounting flame, wondered how such an augury was to be read; for Brower was wholly out of society, while Paston was understood to be (save for some slight but inevitable business entanglements) wholly in it. She decided, finally, that, as Truesdale had met Brower in their own house—involuntarily, as it were—while he had met Paston outside (as a result, inferentially, of his own endeavors and advances), the brilliant future of her brother was in no danger of being compromised. Then she restored the just balance between the two by the thought that Truesdale had taken very kindly to Theod—to Mr. Brower, after all; much more so than Rosy, whose sauciness (she could think of no other word) Jane found herself unable to forgive.

Theodore Brower was some ten years older than Truesdale. His hair was beginning to retreat before his advancing forehead, and about his eyes were coming to appear those lines proper to the man who is in business for himself and pretty largely absorbed in it. He had a pair of shrewd but kindly brown eyes and a straightforward and serious manner. He held his hand more or less on the pulsing actualities of the town, and at one time or another he took Truesdale to most of his clubs—the Crepuscular, the Consolation, the Simplicity, the Universe. At most of these they dined moderately and discussed immoderately, except at the Simplicity, whose avowed object was to free Man from the tyranny of Things. There they discussed and did not dine at all.

Brower called at the Marshall house at discreet intervals; now and then, provided there was a plausible pretext for business, the interval was shortened. He looked after all of old Mr. Marshall's insurance interests, and the alterations in the business premises of Marshall & Belden seemed to furnish him with such a pretext. The various policies required various permits from various companies, and numerous changes to correspond with the changes in the building itself. True, Brower might have sent one of his young men to the store; but he preferred to come himself to the house.

His presence there, under this ruse, was attended by various phenomena. It was then that Jane would pant over the banister and palpitate in doorways, and start and hesitate and advance and retreat, and presently go gliding along the hall, and finally look in through the open door to say, with affected surprise and disappointment:

"Why, dear me, it's only Mr. Brower, after all!"

Then the humiliation which she joyfully supposed him to suffer through the infliction of such an indignity would be cancelled by a fifteen-minute talk which, as regarded Jane's intention at least, would be quite gracious and brilliant. Brower went through this ordeal serenely enough, and never hesitated to expose himself again.

To Rosamund these subterfuges were too obvious for comment; this she reserved for those other occasions when Brower's attentions were not made to assume the mask of business. She objected that he came generally in a sack-coat, that he sometimes presented himself too early, that he dispensed with the mediatory services of a card, that he asked at the door for "Miss Jane," and that she herself was always treated by him as a child.

"Doesn't he know," protested Rosy, "that Jane is 'Miss Marshall'? And does he think that I shall let him go on calling me by a mere nickname?"

She appeared to feel instinctively the point and the justness of these her various exceptions, though where she collected her data it might have been difficult definitely to say. She was served by intuition, perhaps; or by a sixth sense—the social sense—which was now rapidly developing from some recess hidden and hitherto all unsuspected.

Though Brower was out of Society, Truesdale did not find him on this account any the more in Bohemia; he merely occupied the firm and definite middle-ground of business. But Paston, on the other hand, while firmly set in the flowery field of society, was quite capable of lifting a foot now and then to put it within the borders of another and a different area. Truesdale first met him in a sculptor's studio, at the top of one of the great down-town office buildings; the young Briton was escorting a pair of young women of his own circle who seemed disposed to encourage art to the extent of seeing how the thing was done, and whose interest was largely exhausted with an understanding of certain mechanical processes. He and Truesdale subsequently grazed against each other at places where young women, again, were present, whose interest in matters aesthetic was in varying proportions, and whose social foothold was in the lower strata—or substrata, as the case might be. Paston handled life with the easy freedom of a man who, after all, was away from home; and Truesdale was not far behind. Home, with him, was everywhere—or, rather, nowhere; he had a great capacity for gypsy-like jauntings and an immense abhorrence of superfluous luggage, and among the most superfluous of all luggage he included scruples first and foremost. As soon expect a swallow to carry a portmanteau.