A purple flush rose to the General's face, and the expression in his small, watery grey eyes held me speechless.
"Confound you, Ben!" he exclaimed, in a burst of temper, "do you mean to tell me you don't know that George's blamed foolishness is the talk of the town? Why, he hasn't let Sally out of his sight for the last two years."
"No, I didn't know it," I replied.
"Great Scott! Where are your wits?"
"In the stock market," I answered bitterly. Then something in me, out of the chaos and the darkness, rose suddenly, as if with wings, into the light. "Of course Sally is an angel, General, we both know that—but how she could have helped seeing that George is the better man of us, I don't for a minute pretend to understand."
"Well, I never had much opinion of George," responded the General. "It always seemed to me that he ought to have made a great deal more of himself than he has done."
"What he has made of himself," I answered, and my voice sounded harsh in my ears, "is the man that Sally ought to have married."
I went out hurriedly, forgetting to assist him, and limping painfully, he followed me to the porch, and called after me as I ran down into the street. Looking back, as I turned the corner, I saw him getting with difficulty into his buggy, which waited beside the curbing, and it seemed to me that his great bulky figure, in his fur-lined overcoat, was unreal and intangible like the images that one sees in sleep.
The train was about to pull out as I entered the station, and swinging on to the rear coach, I settled myself into the first chair I came to, which happened to be directly behind the shining bald head and red neck of a man I knew. As I shrank back, he turned, caught sight of me, and held out his hand with an easy air of good-fellowship.
"So General Bolingbroke has retired from the South Midland and Atlantic Railroad, I hear," he remarked. "Well, there's a big job waiting for somebody, but he'll have to be a big man to fit it."