As the record ended, Dan flung himself on the sofa, remarking, “I wish Cora and Owen would get married—ye gods, do you get it?” He chuckled. “I’d hand them a chest of small silver if they did. How about it—can’t you get Owen interested?”
“Oh, Cora wouldn’t consider him,” Lorraine said seriously.
Dan chuckled more than ever. “If you had a sense of humor, you’d have a lot of fun, but you take these people at face value. Now Owen clerked for me a month and disorganized the whole shop. I’ll tell you right now that unless he cuts out his nonsense and goes back to the livery stable from which he sprang, I’m going to get him away from here.”
“But his shop is artistic,” Lorraine murmured.
At which Dan tossed a sofa pillow good-naturedly her way. He proceeded, in his slangy fashion, to tell her that this Owen Pringle who had appeared from nowhere some months before and tried his best to create a real, true leisure class in the village was nothing short of several kinds of a fool; that when a full-grown man with apparently nothing the matter with him tries to make his living by starting a shop and spelling it shoppe, and has a wistaria tea room and an art department where you purchase impossible penwipers made of cherry-colored silk, baby bootees and old ladies’ knitted throws, smart Christmas cards telling about everything but Christmas, and writing paper that resembled butchers’ wrappings, as well as crazy old wooden stuff painted bright red and green and labelled “window ledges” or “door stops” and, horror of horrors, a millinery department which this Oweyne conducted himself, making hats resembling Weber and Fields,—it is time to employ violence! But this was not the worst of his offenses. Oh, no—he had tried to organize a country club and persuade hard-working, honest men to play golf instead of raising potatoes and instituted the polo craze, thereby demoralizing all the decent, well-broken delivery horses in the township. He lived at Dan’s old suite at the Hotel Button and gave chafing-dish parties and thought up smart sayings ahead of time. He wanted to organize a stock company and play “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” but Cora Spooner and June Meyers were the only two who had out and out joined, so the project was abandoned “for lack of funds and interest.”
Owen always wore Palm Beach suits and hats draped with Roman scarfs. He was given to a dash of garlic in his salad dressing, believed the dead returned, read French novels and was undeniably seen sitting in the window of his shoppe sewing maline on hat frames and actually trying them on himself for the effect.
At first he was a novelty, but since tea and nasturtium-leaf sandwiches do not appeal to the male population, only females clustered together in his shoppe and bought his nonsense or defended him.
Owen, too, had speedily discovered the advantage of having Mrs. Daniel Birge as a patroness. Despite Dan’s ridicule, she came to the shoppe to buy a hat and thus set the stride for the younger set, while Owen managed to be invited to dinner and to be present on the most interesting of the automobile trips.
“As a member of the idle rich, Owen would have shone,” concluded Dan, “but in life his best getaway would be to become president of the Erie Canal.” Then seeing Lorraine’s real confusion, he said good-naturedly, “If they amuse you, go on, honey, drag the whole lot up here—you have to listen to them,” drifting into an unsociable nap and leaving Lorraine occupied with her thoughts.