They had not expected Mr. Gilchrist to come. Mr. Gilchrist was an undersized, mild little man with greying sideburns. When he was alone he read a great deal.
He had made money in the selling of expensive furniture. He was part owner of a store in Wabash Avenue. It was generally understood that people with taste patronized the Gilchrist-Warren establishment.
He arrived at the Basines' with his wife and his son Aubrey. Keegan and Fanny had returned from a long walk. They and the judge, Henrietta, Basine and his mother and sister Doris all expressed surprise at seeing Mr. Gilchrist. There was always about Mr. Gilchrist the air of a museum piece—a quaint museum piece such as a keen but sentimental collector might delight in.
The exclamations of surprise embarrassed the little man and he stood fingering his sideburns and trying to smile in just the correct way. Mr. Gilchrist's arrival anywhere always precipitated this air of surprise. People said, "Why, Mr. Gilchrist! Awfully glad to see you! Haven't seen you for an age. Well! How are you?"
This was as if they were extremely surprised. But they weren't. They were merely annoyed, upset, vaguely hostile and condescending. And these emotions inspired by the innocent Mr. Gilchrist could be best concealed by the feigning of a correct social astonishment.
To the queries shot at him Mr. Gilchrist answered, "Very well, thank you. Thank you. Very well, thank you."
After greeting him with these exclamation points, people immediately forgot he was present. Mr. Gilchrist would sit the rest of the evening ignored by everybody and trying to the end to smile in just the correct way.
Inside Mr. Gilchrist were many little lonelinesses. His head was full of things he had read, of plots, of great characters, even of epigrams and biting iconoclasms. When people talked he did his best to be attentive. And if they talked about things that interested him—the Kings of France, the Italian wars of the fifteenth century, the topography of early London and kindred subjects—his face would tremble with enthusiasms.
He would listen, his eyes questing eagerly for epigrams, for illuminating sentences he might contribute. But his unegoistic love for the subject would make him inarticulate. His eyes that had seemed about to speak of themselves, that had seemed laden with excited informations would close and a chuckle would come from his lips. The Caesars, the Borgias, the Medicis, the Bourbons, the Valois, Savonarola, Richelieu, the various Charles, Phillips, Williams, Henrys, the plumed headliners of history around whom had centered the hurdy-gurdy intrigues, the circus romances and wars of vanished centuries—these were the hail-fellows of his imagination.
But people seldom talked of these names. People were more interested in contemporary topics. He did his best to be attentive. But his thought played truant and before he knew it he would be going over secretly certain things in his head. Villon, Marlowe, Balzac, Dumas, Gautier, Suetonius—there was a rabble of them continually arguing and declaiming in Mr. Gilchrist's head.