Almost at my first meeting him I
divined something of the public man in his bearing, a suggestion,
perhaps, of the confirmed orator, a notion in which I was somehow
further set by the gesture with which he swept back his carelessly
falling forelock. I was not surprised, then, to hear him referred to
as the "Senator." In some unexplained manner, the Honourable George,
who is never as reserved in public as I could wish him to be, had
chummed up with this person at one of the race-tracks, and had
thereafter been almost quite too pally with him and with the very
curious other members of his family--the name being Floud.
The wife might still be called youngish, a bit florid in type,
plumpish, with yellow hair, though to this a stain had been applied,
leaving it in deficient consonance with her eyebrows; these shading
grayish eyes that crackled with determination. Rather on the large
side she was, forcible of speech and manner, yet curiously eager, I
had at once detected, for the exactly correct thing in dress and
deportment.
The remaining member of the family was a male cousin of the so-called
Senator, his senior evidently by half a score of years, since I took
him to have reached the late fifties. "Cousin Egbert" he was called,
and it was at once apparent to me that he had been most direly
subjugated by the woman whom he addressed with great respect as "Mrs.
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