“I don’t know why we were all so carried away by it,” said Caine, reflectively. “I’ve been thinking it over. There was much more bathos than pathos; and a delightful absence of both elegance and eloquence about his speech. Yet for a moment I was almost tempted to join in your charmingly ill-timed applause. The whole thing savored of cheap melodrama. But—”
“It was the man himself. Not what he said,” answered Jack Hawarden, eager in defense of his new-built idol. “He stood there facing a crowd that would have liked nothing better than to annihilate him. That drunken Thing on the floor was enough by itself to ruin him forever at the Arareek. Yet Conover made us listen and he swayed us to suit himself. Not by what he said, but by his own big strength, I think. There’s something about him I don’t understand. But he’s a man. And, after to-night,—whatever the others say—I take my hat off to him.”
“For the perfecting of a young author’s style,” observed Caine, irrelevantly, “what sample of nervous English can be finer than Carlyle’s ‘Heroes and Hero Worship?’”
His raillery jarred on the boy’s enthusiasm and checked the gush of extravagant praise. Letty Standish, with whom the two were walking home from the Club, took advantage of Jack’s snubbed silence, to put in a word.
“I think Mr. Hawarden is right, Amzi,” she ventured. “There’s something about Mr. Conover that one can’t very well define. I think he could make one do anything he chose. I know I was almost—afraid of him,—before I’d known him ten minutes. I don’t quite think I like him. He’s so powerful, so rough, so domineering. Not like anyone I ever met before. But,” with a slight shudder, “I believe I’d do whatever he ordered me to. Especially if he scowled at me in that bullying way, with his eyes half-shut. Isn’t it funny to feel like that about a person you hardly know?”
She ended with a nervous laugh, and looked up at Caine with a pretty, helpless air of seeking protection. Amzi always found this appealing attitude irresistible. If social longings were Conover’s “feet of clay,” Letty Standish served as a similar pedal handicap for Caine. He wished young Hawarden had not thrust himself upon the tête-à-tête of their homeward walk. He wanted, loverlike, to reassure Letty with unspeakably doughty promises of safeguard from peril; to see her soft round eyes raised to his in the admiration such protestations are wont to excite between very young or very old lovers. But Jack was doggedly treading along beside them in all the charming ignorance of his age and temperament. The boy’s sulks were even now dissolving and he joined again in the talk; still harping on his hero.
“I never met Conover till this morning,” said he. “I wish now I’d known him better. It’s queer I never met him at Miss Shevlin’s. She’s his ward, you know.”
Letty, to whom he spoke, answered with a tinge of the latent sub-acid in her gentle voice:
“I didn’t know. But I’ve noticed things about Miss Shevlin that made it seem quite likely.”
“Miss Shevlin,” said the boy, hotly, “is the prettiest, brightest, best-bred girl I ever knew. If you mean she is—”