The Speaker nodded in his direction.
“The gentleman from Illinois,” he said.
The member began to speak, talking in a low tone for several moments. Something he said provoked a laugh around him. Then the House was still. He was a tall man, and his long black coat hung from heavy shoulders. As he warmed to his subject, and his coat tails swung away from his loins, they revealed a protuberant abdomen; as he warmed still more, the perspiration rolled down his cheeks and on to the neck that lay in folds of fat over his rapidly softening collar. His voice increased in volume. He became excited, he turned around in a vehement outbreak, to address directly some member who, with head bent respectfully to the fictions of parliamentary etiquette, had crept in creaking boots to a desk near the speaker, and there he now sat, a palm nursing his deaf ear. The orator turned yet more directly about, and—
“Why!” Dade cried, “that’s Jerry Gahwood! He’s ouah congressman!”
She craned her pretty chin forward, and leaned her elbows on the wide marble rail to hear the better.
“Do you know him?” Beck asked.
“Why, he’s ouah congressman! He mah’ied Emily Ha’kness—don’t yo’ remembuh? The gyrl who was with me that wintah at the Van Stohn’s in St. Louis?”
“Oh!” said Beck.
She turned in the more immediate personal interest his tone had awakened in her.
“Do yo’ know him?” she asked.