He was a short man, with protruding cheeks, and a nose ending in an amorphous flare of purple and scarlet. His mustache, red like that of his brother, and constituting the only point of physical resemblance between them, grew down over a receding chin, being forced thereto by the bulbous overhang of the nose. He had rufous side-whiskers, clipped moderately close, and carroty hair mixed with gray. His erect shoulders and straight back were a little out of keeping with the rotundity of his figure in other respects; but the combination, hinting, as it did, of affairs both gastronomic and martial, taken with a manner at once dignified, formal, and suave, constituted the most intensely respectable appearance I ever saw. To the imagination of Lattimore he represented everything of which, Cornish fell short, piling Lombard upon Wall Street.
The arrival of these gentlemen was the signal for gathering in the pavilion where dinner was served. The tables were arranged in a great L, at the apex of which sat Jim and the distinguished guests. On one side of him sat Mr. Barr-Smith, who listened absorbedly to the conversation of Mrs. Hinckley, filling every pause with a husky “Quite so!” On the other sat Josie Trescott, who was smiling upon a very tall and spare old man who wore a beautiful white mustache and imperial. I had never met him, but I knew him for General Lattimore. His fondness for Josie was well known; and to him Jim attributed that young lady’s lack of enthusiasm over our schemes for city-building. His presence at this gathering was somewhat of a surprise to me.
Antonia and Cecil Barr-Smith, the Tollivers, Mr. Hinckley and Alice, myself, Mr. Giddings, and Miss Addison sat across the table from the host. Mrs. Trescott, after expressing wonder at the changes wrought in the ravine, and confiding to me her disapproval of the useless expense, had returned to the farm, impelled by that habitual feeling that something was wrong there. Mr. Giddings was exceedingly attentive to Miss Addison.
“I know why you’re trying to look severe,” said he to her, as the consommé was served; “and it’s the only thing I can imagine you making a failure of, unless it would be looking anything but pretty. But you are trying it, and I know why. You think they ought to have had some one say grace before pulling this thing off.”
“I’m not trying to look—anyhow,” she answered. “But you are right in thinking that I believe such duties should not be transgressed, for fear that the world may call us provincial or old-fashioned.”
And she shot a glance at Cornish and Barr-Smith as the visible representatives of the “world.”
“Don’t listen to that age-old clash between fervor and unregeneracy,” said Josie across the narrow table, her remarks made possible by the music of the orchestra, “but tell us about Mr. Barr-Smith and—the other gentlemen.”
“I wanted to ask you about the Britons,” said I; “are they good specimens of the men you saw in England?”
“An art-student, with a consciousness of guilt in slowly eating up the year’s shipment of steers, isn’t likely to know much more of the Barr-Smiths’ London than she can see from the street. But I think them fine examples of not very rare types. I should like to try drawing the elder brother!”
“Before he goes away, I predict—” I began, when my villainous pun was arrested in mid-utterance by the voice of Captain Tolliver, suddenly becoming the culminating peak in the table-talk.