The truth of this view was becoming more and more apparent to Ogden. He withdrew, after some further parleyings, in a confused and inconclusive state of mind--well convinced, however, of McDowell's abilities and more fully conscious of McDowell's position as the husband of his father's daughter. Never did the town of his adoption seem less, indeed, like a kindergarten than when he took his way northward to dinner, or when, later in the early evening, he made his way over to the West Side to call at the Brainards. The thousands of acres of ramshackle that made up the bulk of the city, and the tens of thousands of raw and ugly and half-built prairie that composed its environs, seemed together to constitute a great checker-board over whose squares of "section" and "township" keenness and rapacity played their daring and wary game. And through the middle of the board ran a line, a hinge, a crack--the same line that loomed up in ad those various deeds and abstracts of his with the portentousness and unescapability of the equator--the "line of the third principal meridian."
The Brainard house reared itself in the same frivolous ugliness that we have already viewed; but an excess of light came through the front parlor windows, and Ogden was prepared to find that at least four of the eight burners in the big chandelier were lighted. This turned out to be the case; it was as great a tribute as the family ordinarily paid to society. The family he found represented by Brainard, his wife, and his elder daughter; society was present in the shape of a young couple who were called Mr. and Mrs. Valentine.
The elder daughter received him with a quiet and simple cordiality. He could not help looking about furtively for the possible presence of the younger. He had not remained ignorant of her half-hour wait in a cab outside the bank; but he might have surmised the inflexibility of her father's will. The old man had refused to see her or to let her see him; the most that he would yield was a species of non-committal communication through Burt.
Mrs. Brainard presented herself to Ogden as a peculiarly faded and ineffective person; it was easy enough to grant her an abysmal incapacity. Her husband, in fact, had fallen upon her, crushed her, absorbed her--as a heavy blotting-pad falls on a page of light and delicate writing. Except for one thing she had no aim, no occupation, no diversion--beyond her ills and remedies. This was a penchant for chess. To those who object that chess is an intellectual game, one may simply put the question: have you ever seen it taken up by an elderly, invalided female who has rested content with a mere learning of the moves? It was thus with Mrs. Brainard; she played a good many games with herself every day, and they really soothed and rested her.