She touched the sleeve again, as it might have
been in protection from them, her eyes narrowed, her gaze fixed. It
queerly occurred to me that his lordship might find her as difficult
to know as we had--and yet would keep always trying more than we had,
to be sure. I mean to say, she was no gabbler.
The responses to the Senator's toasts increased in volume. His final
flight, I recall, involved terms like "our blood-cousins of the
British Isles," and introduced a figure of speech about "hands across
the sea," which I thought striking, indeed. The applause aroused by
this was noisy in the extreme, a number of the cattle and horse
persons, including the redskin Tuttle, emitting a shrill, concerted
"yipping" which, though it would never have done with us, seemed
somehow not out of place in North America, although I observed
Belknap-Jackson to make gestures of extreme repugnance while it
lasted.
There ensued a rather flurried wishing of happiness to the pair. A
novel sight it was, the most austere matrons of the North Side set
vying for places in the line that led past them. I found myself trying
to analyze the inner emotions of some of them I best knew as they
fondly greeted the now radiant Countess of Brinstead. But that way
madness lay, as Shakespeare has so aptly said of another matter.
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