The sly and merry look, which I discovered afterwards to be his invincible weapon with the ladies, appeared instantly in his watery grey eyes.
"And you don't even glance at the political headlines? Ah, confess, Miss Matoaca."
He was very stout, very red in the face, very round in the stomach, very roguish in the eyes, yet I realised even then that some twenty years before—when the results of his sportive masculinity had not become visible in his appearance—he must have been handsome enough to have melted even Miss Matoaca's heart. Like a faint lingering beam of autumn sunshine, this comeliness, this blithe and unforgettable charm of youth, still hovered about his heavy and plethoric figure. Across his expansive front there stretched a massive gold chain of a unique pattern, and from this chain, I saw now, there hung a jingling and fascinating bunch of seals. The gentleman I might have forgotten, but that bunch of seals had occupied for three long years a particular corner of my memory; and in the instant that my eyes fell upon it, I saw again the ragged hill covered with pokeberry, yarrow, and stunted sumach, the anchored vessel outlined against the rosy sunset, and the panting stranger, who had stopped to rest with his hand on my shoulder. I remembered suddenly that I wanted to become the president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad.
He stood there now in all his redundant flesh before me, his large mottled cheeks inflated with laughter, his full red lips pursed into a gay and mocking expression. To me he personified success, happiness, achievement—the other shining extreme from my own obscurity and commonness; but the effect upon poor little Miss Matoaca was quite the opposite, I judged the next minute, from the one that he had intended. I watched her fragile shoulders straighten and a glow rather than a flash of spirit pass into her uplifted face.
"With your record, General Bolingbroke," she said, in a quavering yet courageous voice, "you may refuse your approval, but not your respect, to a matter of principle."
The roguish twinkle, which was still so charming, appealed like the lost spirit of youth in the General's eyes.
"Ah, Miss Matoaca," he rejoined, in his most gallant manner, "principles do not apply to ladies!"
At this Miss Matoaca drew herself up almost haughtily, and I felt as I looked at her that only her sex had kept her from becoming a general herself.
"It is very painful to me to disagree with the gentlemen I know," she said, "but when it is a matter of conviction I feel that even the respect of gentlemen should be sacrificed. My sister Mitty considers me quite indelicate, but I cannot conceal from you that—" her voice broke and dropped, but rose again instantly with a clear, silvery sound, "I consider that taxation without representation is tyranny."
A virgin martyr refusing to sacrifice a dove to Venus might have uttered her costly heresy in such a voice and with such a look; but the General met it suavely with a flourish of his wide-brimmed hat and a blandishing smile. He was one of those gentlemen of the old school, I came to know later, to whom it was an inherent impossibility to appear without affectation in the presence of a member of the opposite sex. A high liver, and a good fellow every inch of him, he could be natural, racy, charming, and without vanity, when in the midst of men; but let so much as the rustle of a petticoat sound on the pavement, and he would begin to strut and plume himself as instinctively as the cock in the barnyard.