The Gansers lived in East Eighty-first Street, in the regulation twenty-five-foot brownstone house. And within, also, it was of a familiar New York type. It was the home of the rich, vain ignoramus who has not taste enough to know that those to whom he has trusted for taste have shockingly betrayed him. Ganser had begun as a teamster for a brewery and had grown rapidly rich late in life. He happened to be elected president of a big Verein and so had got the notion that he was a person of importance and attainments beyond his fellows. Too coarse and narrow and ignorant to appreciate the elevated ideals of democracy, he reverted to the European vulgarities of rank and show. He decided that he owed it to himself and his family to live in the estate of ``high folks.'' He bought a house in what was for him an ultra-fashionable quarter, and called for bids to furnish it in the latest style. The results were even more regardless of taste than of expense--carpets that fought with curtains, pictures that quarreled with their frames and with the walls, upholstery so bellicose that it seemed perilous to sit upon.
But Feuerstein was as impressed as the Gansers had been the first time they beheld the gorgeousness of their palace. He looked about with a proprietary sense-- ``I'll marry this little idiot,'' he said to himself. ``Maybe my nest won't be downy, and maybe I won't lie at my ease in it!''
He met Mrs. Ganser and had the opportunity to see just what Lena would look and be twenty years thence. Mrs. Ganser moved with great reluctance and difficulty. She did not speak unless forced and then her voice seemed to have felt its way up feebly through a long and painfully narrow passage, emerging thin, low and fainting. When she sat--or, rather, AS she sat, for she was always sitting--her mountain of soft flesh seemed to be slowly collapsing upon and around the chair like a lump of dough on a mold. Her only interest in life was disclosed when she was settled and settling at the luncheon table. She used her knife more than her fork and her fingers more than either. Feuerstein left soon after luncheon, lingering only long enough to give Lena a theatrical embrace. ``Well, I'll not spend much time with those women, once I'm married,'' he reflected as he went down the steps; and he thought of Hilda and sighed.
The next day but one he met Lena in the edge of the park and, after gloomy silence, shot with strange piercing looks that made her feel as if she were the heroine of a book, he burst forth with a demand for immediate marriage.
``Forty-eight hours of torment!'' he cried. ``I shall not leave you again until you are securely mine.''
He proceeded to drop vague, adroit hints of the perils that beset a fascinating actor's life, of the women that had come and gone in his life. And Lena, all a-tremble with jealous anxiety, was in the parlor of a Lutheran parsonage, with the minister reading out of the black book, before she was quite aware that she and her cyclonic adorer were not still promenading near the green-house in the park. ``Now,'' said Feuerstein briskly, as they were once more in the open air, ``we'll go to your father.''
``Goodness gracious, no,'' protested Lena. ``You don't know him--he'll be crazy --just crazy! We must wait till he finds out about you--then he'll be very proud. He wanted a son-in-law of high social standing--a gentleman.''
``We will go home, I tell you,'' replied Feuerstein firmly--his tone was now the tone of the master. All the sentiment was out of it and all the hardness in it.
Lena felt the change without understanding it. ``I bet you, pa'll make you wish you'd taken my advice,'' she said sullenly.
But Feuerstein led her home. They went up stairs where Mrs.
