I walked back to Mary's with Joe Lane, while Hector followed, making a kind of Royal Progress through the crowds, with his mother and Miss Rainey.
“You see it now, yourself, don't you?” Joe said to me.
“You mean about his doing well?”
“What else? He's just shown what he can do with people. The day will come when you'll have to take him at his own valuation.”
I couldn't help laughing. “Well, Joe,” I said, “that sounds as if you, at least, already took Hector at his own valuation.”
“In some things,” he answered, “I think I do. Don't you take him for an ass, sir. Sometimes I believe he's guided by a really superior intelligence—”
“Must be a sub-consciousness, then, Joe!”
“Exactly,” he said seriously. “He doesn't make a single mistake. He's trained his manner so that, while a very few people laugh at him, he does things that the town would resent in any one else. He doesn't go round with the boys, and they look up to him for it. He isn't pompous, but he's acquired a kind of stateliness of manner that's made Greenville call him 'Mister Ransom' instead of 'Hec.' You probably think that his request to the National Committee only shows he's got all the nerve in the world; but I believe, on my soul, that if it had been granted he could have made good.”
“What did he want to run Passley Trimmer into his Pantheon for, to-day?” I asked.