“We’ll have to invite Jim longer ahead of time,” said he. “He’s getting to be in demand.”
He seemed to be in demand—a fact that Jennie confirmed by observation as she chatted with Deacon Avery, Mrs. Columbus Brown and her husband, and the Orator of the Day, at the table set apart for the guests and notables. Jim received a dozen invitations as he passed the groups seated on the grass—one of them from Mrs. Cornelius Bonner, who saw no particular point in advertising disgruntlement. The children ran to him and clung to his hands; young girls gave him sisterly smiles and such trifles as chicken drumsticks, pieces of cake and like tidbits. His passage to the numerous groups at a square table under a big burr-oak was quite an ovation—an ovation of the significance of which he was himself quite unaware. The people were just friendly, that was all—to his mind.
But Jennie—the daughter of a politician and a promising one herself—Jennie sensed the fact that Jim Irwin had won something from the people of the Woodruff District in the way of deference. Still he was the gangling, Lincolnian, ill-dressed, poverty-stricken Jim Irwin of old, but Jennie had no longer the feeling that one’s standing was somewhat compromised by association with him. He had begun to put on something more significant than clothes, something which he had possessed all the time, but which became valid only as it was publicly apprehended. There was a slight air of command in his down-sitting and up-rising at the picnic. He was clearly the central figure of his group, in which she recognized the Bronsons, those queer children from Tennessee, the Simmses, the Talcotts, the Hansens, the Hamms and Colonel Woodruff’s hired man, Pete, whose other name is not recorded.
Jim sat down between Bettina Hansen, a flaxen-haired young Brunhilde of seventeen, and Calista Simms—Jennie saw him do it, while listening to Wilbur Smythe’s account of the exacting nature of the big law practise he was building up,—and would have been glad to exchange places with Calista or Bettina.
The repast drew to a close; and over by the burr-oak the crowd had grown to a circle surrounding Jim Irwin.
“He seems to be making an address,” said Wilbur Smythe.
“Well, Wilbur,” replied the colonel, “you had the first shot at us. Suppose we move over and see what’s under discussion.”
As they approached the group, they heard Jim Irwin answering something which Ezra Bronson had said.
“You think so, Ezra,” said he, “and it seems reasonable that big creameries like those at Omaha, Sioux City, Des Moines and the other centralizer points can make butter cheaper than we would do here—but we’ve the figures that show that they aren’t economical.”
“They can’t make good butter, for one thing,” said Newton Bronson cockily.