The Lovely Lady | Page 9

In the late summer of that year Peter went up to the city with Mr.
Greenslet to lay in his winter stock and remained in canned goods with
Siegel Brothers' Household Emporium. That his mother had rented the
farming land for cash was the immediate occasion of his setting out,
but there were several other reasons and a great many opinions. Mr.

Greenslet had a boy of his own coming on for Peter's place; Bet, the
mare, had died, and the farm implements wanted renewing; in spite of
which Mrs. Weatheral could hardly have made up her mind to spare
him except for the opportune appearance of the cash renter. With that
and the chickens and the sewing, she and Ellen could take care of
themselves and the interest, which would leave all that Peter could
make to count against the mortgage.
They put it hopefully to one another so, as they sat about the kitchen
stove, all three of them holding hands, on the evening before his
departure. But the opinions, which were rather thicker at Bloombury
than opportunities, were by no means so confident as Peter could have
wished if he had known them. Mr. Greenslet thought it couldn't be
much worse than Peter's present situation, and the neighbours were sure
it wasn't much better. The minister had a great deal to say of the
temptations of a young man in the city, which was afterward
invalidated by the city's turning out quite another place than he
described it.
It was left for Ellen and Mrs. Jim Harvey to make the happy
prognostication. "You can trust Peter," Ada was confident.
"But you got to be mighty cute to get in with those city fellows," her
husband warned her, "and Peter's so dashed simple; never sees anything
except what's right in front of him. Now a man"--Jim assumed this
estate for himself in the right of being three months married--"has got
to look on all sides of a thing."
As for Ellen, she hadn't the slightest doubt that Peter was shortly to
become immensely wealthy and she was to go up and keep house for
him.
"There'll be gold chairs in the parlour and real Brussels," she
anticipated. Peter affected to think it unlikely that she could be spared
by the highly mythical person who was to carry her off to keep house
for himself. Somehow Peter could never fall into the normal
Bloombury attitude of thinking that if you had hip disease, your life
was bound to be different from everybody's and you might as well say

so right out, flat-footed, and be done with it.
With all this, finally he was got off to the city in the wake of Mr.
Greenslet, and the first discovery he made there was that outside of
Siegel Brothers, and a collarless man with a discouraged moustache
who appeared in the hall of his lodging-house when the rent was due,
he was practically invisible. As he went up and down the stairs sodden
with scrub water which never by any possible chance left them
scrubbed, nobody spoke to him. Nobody in the street saw him walking
to and fro in his young loneliness. There were men passing there with
faces like Mr. Dassonville's, keen and competent, and lovely ladies in
soft becoming wraps and bright winged hats--such hats! Peter would
like to have hailed some of these as one immeasurably behind but still
in the way, seized of that precious inward quality which manifests itself
in competency and brightness. He would have liked to feel them
looking on friendlily at his business of becoming rich; but he remained,
as far as any word from them was concerned, completely invisible. He
came after a while to the conclusion that most of those who went up
and down with him were in the same unregarded condition.
The city appeared quite habituated to this state of affairs; hordes of
them came and went unconfronted between banked windows of warmth
and loveliness, past doors from which light and music overflowed into
the dim street in splashes of colour and sound, where people equally
under the prohibition lapped them up hungrily like dogs at puddles.
Sometimes in the street cars or subways he brushed against fair girls
from whom the delicate aroma of personality was like a waft out of that
country of which his preferences and appreciations acknowledged him
a native, but no smallest flutter of kinship ever put forth from them to
Peter. The place was crammed full of everything that anybody could
want and nobody could get at it, at least not Peter, nor anybody he
knew at Siegel Brothers. And at the lodging house they seemed never
to have heard of the undiminished heaps of splendour that lay piled
behind plate glass and polished