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Sommers stopped and looked at the broad windows, and then, reflecting that he had nothing to do before dining with the Hitchcocks except to see Webber, he went in with a file of other men. White and Einstein's offices were much more resplendent than the little room in the basement, where they had started two years before. There were many glass partitions and much mahogany-stained furniture.
The Hitchcocks and the Sommerses came from the same little village in Maine; they had moved west, about the same time, a few years before the Civil War: Alexander Hitchcock to Chicago; the senior Dr. Sommers to Marion, Ohio. Alexander Hitchcock had been colonel of the regiment in which Isaac Sommers served as surgeon.
Sommers spent his days and nights in Burnside for several weeks. When he had time to think, he wondered why the manager employed him. If the Hitchcocks had been in the city, he should have suspected that they had a hand in the matter. But he remembered having seen in a newspaper some months before that the Hitchcocks were leaving for Europe.
Dresser's enthusiasm almost persuaded him that Lindsay had given him something valuable. And if he found it difficult to explain his distaste for the thing to Dresser, what would he have to say to other people to the Hitchcocks?
His mother left him her full share of Yankee grit, and a little house in Salem which has belonged to her family for more than two hundred years. She was a Hitchcock, and the Hitchcocks had been settled in Salem since the year 1. It was a great-great-grandfather of Mr. Eliphalet Hitchcock who was foremost in the time of the Salem witchcraft craze.
His mother left him her full share of Yankee grit and a little old house in Salem which had belonged to her family for more than two hundred years. She was a Hitchcock, and the Hitchcocks had been settled in Salem since the year 1. It was a great-great-grandfather of Mr. Eliphalet Hitchcock who was foremost in the time of the Salem witchcraft craze.
The dinner at the Hitchcocks' was very simple. Parker had gone out "to enjoy his success in not getting to Cuba," as Colonel Hitchcock expressed it grimly. The old merchant's manner toward the doctor was cordial, but constrained. At times during the dinner Sommers found Colonel Hitchcock's eyes resting upon him, as if he were trying to understand him.
There's five of the Lawsons to begin with I suppose they'll all come Bill Huff and Jany, that's seven " "That Bill Huff is as good-natured a fellow as ever broke ground," remarked Mr. Van Brunt. "Ain't better people in the town than them Huffs are." "They're well enough," said Miss Fortune. "Seven and the Hitchcocks, there's three of them, that'll make ten "
"It was lucky for you," Sommers remarked good-humoredly, "that I was thick enough with the bloodsuckers to get you that letter from Hitchcock. One of us will have to stand in with the 'swilling, fat-fed capitalist." "Are those Hitchcocks rich?" Dresser asked, his eye resting wistfully on a square note that the young doctor had laid aside. "I suppose so," Sommers answered.
A mist of undiscussed views hung about the house, out of which flashed now and then a sharp speech, a bitter sigh. He had been at the house a good deal in a thoroughly informal manner. The Hitchcocks rarely entertained in the "new" way, for Mrs. Hitchcock had a terror of formality.
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