The idea that Mr. Conover was capable of inciting any such disputation so flattered that poor, spiritless little creature that she actually bridled and looked about her to make sure Anice and Gerald, the only other members of the household present, had heard.
The quartette were seated in the Conover library, whither they had gathered after dinner for one of those brief intervals of family intercourse which Caleb secretly loved, his wife as secretly dreaded and Gerald openly loathed. The Railroader, at heart, was an intensely home-loving man. He had never known a home. Least of all since moving into the Mausoleum. He had always, in increasingly blundering fashion, sought to make one.
The wife he bullied, the son he hectored, the daughter with whom he had forever quarrelled, the secretary who met his friendliness with unbroken reserve; all these he had tried to enroll as assistants in his various homemaking plans. The results had not been so successful as to warrant description.
Finally, Conover had centred his former efforts on one daily plan. He had read in the advice column of the Star about the joys of “pleasant evening hour in the bosom of one’s family” and the directions therefor. The idea appealed to him. He ordained accordingly that after the unfashionably early evening meal the household should congregate in the library, and there for at least one hour indulge in carefree confidential chat. This, Caleb mentally argued, was a capital opening wedge in the inculcation of the true home-spirit which had been his lifelong dream.
The household obeyed the order, even as all Conover’s orders—at home and abroad—were obeyed. The session usually began in laborious efforts at small talk. Then an unfortunate remark of some sort from Mrs. Conover, or an impertinence or sneer from Gerald, and the storm would break. The “pleasant evening hour” oftener than not ended in a sea of weakly miserable tears from Mrs. Conover, a cowed or sotto voce profane exit on Gerald’s part, and in Caleb’s stamping off to his study or else around to the Kerrigans’ for a blissful, shirt-sleeved, old-time political argument in front of the saloon’s back-room stove.
On this present evening Caleb had just received Shevlin’s report of the Standish tour. He was full of the theme and strove to interest his three hearers in it. In Anice he found, as ever, an eager listener. But Gerald yawned in very apparent boredom, while Mrs. Conover shed a few delightfully easy, but irritating tears at the account of the opera house fight. Caleb had silently resented these moist signs of interest, and his glare had called forth an unusual protest from his weak little spouse.
“I’m sure,” she went on, nervously taking advantage of the rare fit of courage that possessed her, “I’m quite sure somebody else must have put this Governorship idea into poor Clive’s head. He’d never have thought of such a rash thing by himself. I don’t believe that at heart he really wants to be Governor at all. He——”
“If he don’t,” remarked Conover, “I guess that makes it unanimous. I wish that idiot Shevlin hadn’t given him the chance to play to the gallery, though, in a fist fight. It’ll mean votes for him. Folks have a sort of liking for a man who can scrap. By the way, Jerry, if you go around to Headquarters to-night, tell Bourke I want him to run to Matawan for me to-morrow on that floater business. He——”
“I don’t believe they can spare Bourke at Headquarters just now,” began Gerald, with a faint show of interest. “You see——”
“If he was the sort of man they could spare, he wouldn’t be the sort of man I’d want to send on a ticklish job like this. Has Brayle showed up at any of our rallies yet?”