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Percifer wired us from New York the day the bride-elect started, and she was to wire us from Ogden, which she did. I went to the train to meet her, and I told Tom to be on the watch for the bridegroom, who would come in from his ranch on the Snake River, by wagon or on horseback, across country from Ten Mile. To come by rail he'd have had to go round a hundred miles or so, by Mountain Home.
Percifer than it fitted me; but mistaking my smile of irony for one of encouragement, he babbled on. I wish I could do justice to his "charmin'" accent and his perfectly unstudied manner of speech, a mixture of British and American colloquialisms, not to say slang. "It's like this, Mrs. Daly. A man oughtn't to be a dog-in-the-manger about a girl, even if he has got her promise, you know.
Presently he stopped, and raised his hat, and asked if I was Mrs. Daly, a friend of Mrs. Percifer of London and New York. Not to be boastful, I said that I knew Mrs. Percifer. "Then," said he, "we are here on the same errand, I think." I was there to meet Miss Kitty Comyn, I told him, and he said so was he, and might he have a little talk with me? He seemed excited and serious, very.
"Your cousin takes a royal way of bringing home his bride by proxy," I said. "Ah, but it's partly my fault, you know" he could not quell a sudden shamefaced laugh, "if you'd kindly allow me to explain. I shall have to be quite brutally frank; but Mrs. Percifer said" Here he lugged in a propitiatory compliment, which sounded no more like Mrs.
Percifer, who is so clever at managing, persuaded me I should need them directly on the ranch curtains and rugs and china, and heaven knows what! She nearly killed me, dragging me about those enormous New York shops. She said it would be far and away cheaper and better to buy them there. I didn't mind about anything, I was so scared and homesick; I did whatever she said.
She is a little English girl, upper middle class, which Mrs. Percifer assures us is the class to belong to in England at the present day, from which we infer that it's her class; and the interesting reunion is to take place at our house the young woman never having seen us in her life before.
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