"Tour friends called again this morning," he began, folding up two or three documents and thrusting them into the pigeon-holes before him. "We have had quite a session. But they're fixed finally. Does that cousin of theirs live with them?"
"Cousin? Isn't she their sister--sister-in-law?"
"I mean the other one; Miss--Bradley, isn't it?"
"Oh! Well, no; she comes in and stays with them a week now and then. But her people live in Hinsdale."
"Hinsdale; nice country around there. Seems as if you just had to get outside of Cook County to find anything hilly or even rolling. I'd like to take it up first rate. The minute you are over the county line you get clean out of all that flat land and everything's up and down--like around Worcester. But I don't believe they save much on taxes."
He tore some pencilled memoranda off the top of a pad and threw them into the waste-basket.
"Yes, the sister-in-law was here, all right enough. She's a pretty smart woman, too; got a good deal more head than any of the rest of them. She's striking out a little late, but she may make something of herself yet.
"But she wants to get that poetical streak out of her," he went on. "What was it she said, now? Oh, yes; all this down-town racket came to her like the music of a battle-hymn. Our hustling, it seems, resembles a hand-to-hand combat from street to street--she lugged in mediæval Florence. And to finish up with, she told me I was like a gladiator stripped for the fray." He ran his hand down the stripes of his handsome trousers. "What did she mean by that? Was it some of her Boston literary business?"
He lifted his hand and thoughtfully twirled the scanty locks over one of his ears.
"Here's a letter I got this morning from Hittie." He drew out a small folded sheet from the bottom of a pile of correspondence. "She has about come around to my way of thinking. There don't seem any very good reason for my travelling away down there again, especially when your father and mother are going to move out here anyway. I'm awful busy. She'll have her own family at the wedding, then, and she'll give me a show to scare up some of mine. Things are just too rushing--that's the amount of it."
"I'm glad to have it settled one way or another," George said. "And how about that other affair--have you made any report to father?"
