“What? Is society really so dreadful to a young girl?” asked the husband.
“It’s the most tiresome thing in the world after the novelty wears off,” said Mrs. Tramlay, “unless she is fond of flirting, or gets into one of the prosy sets where they talk about nothing but books and music and pictures and blue china and such things.”
“ ‘Live and learn,’ ” quoted the merchant. “Next time I become a young man and marry I’ll bring up my family in the country. My sisters had at least horses and trees and birds and flowers and chickens to amuse them, and not one of them married until she was twenty-five.”
Mrs. Tramlay maintained a discreet silence, for, except their admiration for their brother, Mrs. Tramlay had never been able to find a point of contact in her sisters-in-law. Tramlay slowly left the room and went to his club, informing himself, as he walked, that there were times in which a man really needed the society of men.
Meanwhile, Phil had for the twentieth time been closeted with the purchasing officials of the Lake and Gulfside Railroad,—as disagreeable and suspicious a couple as he had ever found among Haynton’s assortment of expert grumblers. Had he been more experienced in business he would have been less hopeful, for, as everybody who was anybody in the iron trade knew the Lake and Gulfside had planned a branch nearly two hundred miles long, and there would be forty or fifty thousand tons of rails needed, everybody who was anybody in the iron trade was trying to secure at least a portion of the order. Phil’s suggestion that Tramlay should try to secure the contract had affected the merchant about as a proposition of a child to build a house might have done; but, to avoid depressing the young man’s spirits, he had consented, and had himself gone so far as to get terms, for portions of the possible order, from men who were looking for encouragement to open their long-closed mills. Unknown to the merchant, and fortunately for Phil, one of the Lake and Gulfside purchasing agents had years before chanced to be a director in a company that placed a small order with Tramlay, and, remembering and liking the way in which it had been filled, was predisposed toward the house’s new representative from the first. But Tramlay, not knowing this, laid everything to Phil’s luck when the young man invaded the whist-room of the club, called Tramlay away from a table just as cards had been dealt, and exclaimed, in a hoarse whisper,—
“I’ve got it!”
“Got what?” asked the merchant, not over-pleased at the interruption. Phil stared so wildly that his employer continued, “Not the smallpox, I trust. What is it? Can’t you speak?”
“I should think you’d know,” said the young man, looking somewhat aggrieved.
“Not Lake and Gulfside?”
“Exactly that,” said Phil, removing his hat and holding it just as he remembered to have seen a conqueror’s hat held in a colored print of “General Scott entering the City of Mexico.”