The invitations to his daughter's wedding had been eagerly accepted. The speculations as to whether the bills would be paid or not added to the interest. In those days the florist and the dressmaker were quite local celebrities. They looked anxious, yet rather pleasantly self-conscious. The dressmaker bragged by day and lay awake by night. Every time the florist felt uneasy, he slipped across to the nearest saloon and got a drink of beer. After that, when asked if he did not feel afraid he would lose money through the Carroll wedding, he said something about the general esteem in which people should be held who patronized local industries, in his thick German-English, grinned, and shambled back, his fat hips shaking like a woman's, to his hot-houses, and pottered around his geraniums and decorative palms. On the Sunday morning before the wedding there were an unusual number of men in the barber-shop--old Eastman, Frank's father, who generally shaved himself, besides Amidon, Drake, the postmaster, Tappan the milkman, and a number of others. Amidon was in the chair, and spoke whenever it did not seem too hazardous. He had just had his hair cut also, as a delicate concession to the barber on the part of a free customer on a busy morning, and his rather large head glistened like a silver ball. "Reckon Carroll must have gone out West promotin' to raise a little wind for the weddin'," he said. "I haven't seed him, and I atropined he had not come back yet," remarked the barber. Lee looked up from his Sunday paper--all the men except young Willy Eddy were provided with Sunday papers; he waited patiently for a spare page finished and thrown aside by another. Besides the odors of soap and perfumed oils and bay-rum and tobacco-smoke, that filled the little place, was the redolence of fresh newspapers, staring with violent head-lines, and as full of rustle as a forest. Lee looked up from his paper, and gave his head a curious, consequential toss. He had been shaved himself, and his little tuft of yellow beard was trimmed to a nicety. He looked sleek and well-dressed, and he had always his indefinable air of straining himself furtively upon tiptoe to reach some unattainable height. Lee's consequentiality had something painful about it at times. "I guess Captain Carroll hadn't any need to go out West promoting. I rather think he can find all the business he wants right here," he said. Tappan the milkman, bearded and grim, looked up from an article on the coal strike. "Guess he _can_ find about fools enough right here to work on, that's right," said he, and there was a laugh. Lee's small blond face colored furiously; his voice was shrill in response. "Perhaps those he doesn't work, as you call it, are bigger fools than those he does," said he.