"Why not, indeed?" cried Aim Wilde. "_I_ haven't been around much yet, but you strike me as the most imaginative lot of people I ever saw."
"Whenever Chicago is involved," amended Walworth.
"How you idealize it!" cried Ann, enthusiastically. "How you--"
"It needs to be idealized--and badly," said her sister.
But McDowell's interests in the southern suburbs as well as at St. Asaph's were soon set aside by another matter; domestic interests claimed his attention.
His father-in-law had now passed some two or three months in Chicago. He had entered the city without any conception of its magnitude, and he had remained in it without rising to any conception of its metropolitan complexities. He had made a change that was too great and too late. He made but an ineffectual attempt to connect and identify himself with the great rush of life going on all about him. He came down town almost every day to spend an hour or more in McDowell's office, where he took a certain satisfaction in following out the intricacies of the local topography by passing a thin, blue-veined hand over McDowell's maps and his canvas bound books of plats. McDowell treated him with considerable patience and with as much respect as was due to a man who had no great experience in real estate and little aptitude for learning. One day old Mr. Ogden, who apprehended the lake winds little better than the local "lay of the land," took a slight cold in returning home from the office; two days after pneumonia developed, and within a week he died.
George undertook the charge of such arrangements as recognized the old New-Englander as a dead man merely, and McDowell subsequently took charge of those which recognized him as a dead property-owner. First, the funeral; afterwards, the Probate Court.
A funeral is more disagreeable than a wedding, chiefly because its multifarious details make their demands with but a scanty notice in advance. All of these details George was now called upon to face and to dispose of.
He squared his jaw, set his eyes, put a cold, heavy paving-stone in place of his heart, and met these details one by one. It was a man's privilege.
Brower went with him to the undertaker's, and mediated between grief and rapacity.