"I have been telling Mr. Ogden," said Walworth, "that he ought to be in our part of town--he ought to be one of our little circle." His wife looked up rather coldly; her little circle was not open to any new candidate that the uncalculating good-nature of her husband might propose. "That house around on Hush Street could take him in, I imagine. And all the people he will want to know are right around there. Why, you have been in Worcester, Frances; you know the Parkers. Well, Mrs. Parker is Mr. Ogden's aunt--aunt, I think you said?--yes, aunt; so you see about how it is. Always glad to welcome one more Eastern pilgrim to our little what-you-may-call-it--oasis, you know."
"Why didn't you say Mr. Ogden was from the East, Walworth?" asked his wife, taxingly, and looked at the young man for the first time.
Her gaze was critical, but not forbidding.
"Yes, most of _us_ are on the North Side," she observed.
"Ogden is as good as a neighbor already," Walworth went on, perseveringly; "a business neighbor. He is going into the Underground National. Letters and all that, you know. Pretty good for three weeks, I call it. If most of our fellows who come out here did as well in three months it would be money in Mrs. Lloyd's pocket. To think of the fives and tens and twenties that have gone to old schoolmates of Win's and to fellows who knew Lovell when he was on the road!"
Ogden flushed a little and took the first step towards a frown. It is not pleasant to contemplate your possible inclusion in the reprehensible class of the strapped and the stranded, nor to feel that only a lucky letter of recommendation has saved a friend's wife from being crossed in some caprice or balked in some whim. But Floyd, although cordial and liberal, was not invariably fine.
"They stop me on the street, and they buttonhole me in the hotels, and you can't think how many of them come right here. Of course, I always do what I can. But how do they find me out? And why is it that when I am going up home late over the viaduct and somebody is hanging about to strike some man for a quarter, I am always the man to be struck? One or two of them have actually paid me back, but--"
"Who?" asked his sister-in-law. She had a loud, rasping voice. "The men on the viaduct?"