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.
Dan’s other two particular pests and Lorraine’s friends were Josie Donaldson and Hazel Mitchell. Josie Donaldson’s father was next to Dan the richest man in the village and Josie the natural and fearful result of being the only child of such a plutocrat.
She was a precocious young person with the boast that she could do anything she set out to do, if she could do it her way, backed up by admiring throngs of relatives. She had framed the first dollar bill she ever earned (?) for some minor service in her father’s hardware store, had worn the patience of the newspaper editors to a thread by asking for a job as a reporter only to take a few days off, after she was hired, to give a party or write a new poem. Dan called her poems “Josie’s dope,” as they appeared from time to time in a box border with the heading, “Birge’s Corners’ Muse.”
There were many familiar phrases in these poems which increased in number as time went on, but being Josie Donaldson’s, they were passed without question and editor after editor would warn his new and optimistic successor, “When that Donaldson girl comes in here for a job just tie the can on from the start. It is cheap at half the price to be rid of her. You’ll know her. She’s fat and dresses like a circus rider, carries a bolt of baby ribbon around so as to tie up any poems she may happen to write en route. She’ll cry if you correct her spelling and she was never known to get any one’s initials right in her life, not even her own family’s. Fudge ought to be her life work. She’s made love to every fellow in the burg and, when they escape, she wants to start a backbiting contest in the paper. Her pa and ma think Josie is one, two, three, all right, and they have enlarged photographs of her at every stage—from writhing on the fur rug clad in a smile to her graduating dress clasping the valedictory essay. She writes her father’s ads and I’m darned if I can tell whether he wants to run a special sale of sprinkling cans at seventy-nine cents per or whether hell’s broken loose in Hoboken! Don’t let her get across—not even for a week or you’ll have galloping brain fever.”
