"I think one of the delights of wide travel is to be able to pronounce names of obscure places in such a way that stay-at-homes won't know what you're talking about," Cousin Eunice said, looking toward mother and me. She had not intended interrupting the masculine conversation, but Rufe stopped and listened to what she had to say, which proves that he is a model husband, I think—"Did you notice how he called Peru 'Payrhu' last night? Of course he's been there."
"I noticed the new-fangled way he had with several of his words," father said, a bit drily. "He differentiated between 'egoist' and 'egotist.' He seems to have been there, too."
"Surely," Rufe coincided so willingly that I was amazed. "But the quality of egotism possessed by this fellow is not the cheap, objectionable kind. He simply has unlimited faith in himself, and an unlimited ability of making other people do what he wants them to do."
"A tyrant, then?" father inquired with a half-smile at Rufe's enthusiasm.
"Not at all—a governor."
"Well, who is he and where did he come from?" mother asked, coming into the discussion in an abstracted sort of fashion. "I never heard of him until the last few months."
Then followed a long discourse concerning Richard Chalmers' past life, and his qualifications for the office which he might be called upon to fill—all of which fell like diamonds and rubies from their lips, for it was all creditable to him.
The look of strength, which had told its own story the first time I had ever seen him, and which had since then held me in the spell of a fascinated memory—it was all true, then! As I listened to the story of how the man had, by sheer strength and personality, raised himself from being simply a well-thought-of young lawyer, with a good deal of inherited wealth, to his present position in the minds of the state's best politicians, I felt that he must possess that steel-clad, relentless, yet necessary attribute—power.
Now, I revere power, whether in man, or beast, or automobile.
"Next to marrying it, the worst way on earth for a man to get money is to inherit it," father said, apropos of the story we had just heard. "It's bad for the man, and it's bad for the money."