"Well," observed the judge, "I presume it's too early. Has she heard from him?"
"She had a letter this morning; that is, I suppose it was from him; she ran to meet the postman, and then went up stairs."
Mrs. Blair looked at her husband in surprise, and he hastened to make amends by acquiescing in the propriety of her conduct, when he said:
He seemed to drop the subject then, but that it remained uppermost in his mind was shown later, when he said:
"I think she will be weaned away from him after a while, don't you? That is--if he stays long enough."
Mrs. Blair was not so hopeful; perhaps, too, in her romantic ideal of devotion, she did not wish Lavinia to be weaned away. But she avoided a direct answer by the suggestion:
"Perhaps he will be weaned away from her."
This possibility had not occurred to the judge.
"Why, the idea!" he said resentfully. "Do you think him capable of such baseness?"
"Would you like to think of _your_ daughter as fickle, and forgetting a young man who was eating his heart out for her far away in a big city?"
A condition of such mild romantic sorrow might have attracted Mrs. Blair in the abstract, but it could not of course appeal to her when it came thus personally. As for the judge, he dismissed the problem, as he had so many times before, with the remark:
The letter which Lavinia received from Marley had been written the day he reached Chicago. It was a long letter, conceived largely in a facetious spirit, and he had labored over it far into the night in the little room of the boarding-house he had found in Ohio Street.
"I chose Ohio Street," he wrote, "because its name reminded me of home. Ohio Street may once have been the street of the well-born, but it has degenerated and it is now the abode of a long row of boarding--places, one of which houses me. My room is a little corner eyrie in the second story, back, and from its one window I get an admirable view of the garbage dump, the atmosphere and certain intensely red bricks which go to make the wall of the house next door. And my landlady, ah, I should have to be a Balzac to describe my landlady! She wears large, vociferous ear-rings, and she says 'y-e-e-a-a-s' for yes; just kind o' rolls it off her tongue as if she didn't care whether it ever got off or not. She is truly a beauteous lady, given much to a scarlet hue of her nasal appendage; also, her molar system is unduly prominent, too much to the fore, as it were. As for form or figure, I'm afraid I couldn't say with truth that she goes in for the sinuous, far from it; she leans more to the elephantine style of feminine architecture. And she has a way of reaching out that is very attractive; probably because of the necessity of reaching for room rent. She bears the air of one bent on no earthly thing, of a continual soaring in quest of the unexpected; there is about her the charm of the intangible, the unknowable.