"I like the looks of that, governor," he said, "but it's a pity you can't find a wife. A woman gives an air to things, you know." Then he cocked an eye at the ceiling. "This old house ain't much more than a fire trap, anyway," he added. "The trouble is it's gotten old-fashioned just like the Capitol building over there. My constituents are all in favour of doing the proud thing by Virginia and giving her a real up-to-date State House. Bless my life, the old Commonwealth deserves a brownstone front—now don't she?"
He appealed to Rann, who dissented in his broad, if blunt, intelligence.
"I wouldn't trade that old building for all the brownstone between here and New York harbour," he declared.
The governor laughed abstractedly, but a week later he recalled the proposition as he sat in Juliet Galt's drawing-room, and repeated it for the sake of her frank disgust.
"I shall tell Eugie," she exclaimed. "Eugie finds everything so new that she suffers a perpetual homesickness for Kingsborough."
"There's nobody left down there except the judge and Mrs. Webb," broke in Carrie; "and you know she gets on dreadfully with Mrs. Webb—now doesn't she, Aunt Sally?"
"She never told me so," laughed Sally, "but I strongly suspect it. I don't disguise the fact that I consider Mrs. Webb to be a terror, and Eugie's a long way off from saintship."
"I hardly think that Mrs. Webb would consent to join our colony," observed Nicholas indifferently.
"May Kingsborough long enjoy her rule," added Juliet. "I hear that she has grown quite amiable towards the judge since she prophesied that he would have chronic gout and he had it."
"It would be so nice of them to marry each other," suggested Carrie with an eye for matrimonial interests. "You needn't shake your head, mamma. Aunt Sally said the same thing to Uncle Tom."