He smiled.
“To say nothing of your fondness for Mr. Everett. A charming gentleman, I grant. But the helm of state is not to be in his hands. Even, supposing”—grave again, and sighing slightly—“that they are strong enough to hold it in a storm.”
There was a boding pause. Then I spoke, and unadvisedly:
“I ask no questions that I think you would not care to answer. But I do hope you are not thinking of voting for Abraham Lincoln? Think of him in the White House! Mr. Buchanan may be weak—and a Democrat. I heard father say, as the one drop of comfort he could express from his election: ‘At any rate, he is a gentleman by birth and breeding.’ Mr. Lincoln is low-born, and has no pretensions to breeding.”
“Then, if I should be so far lost to the proprieties as to vote for him, I would better not let either of you know.” And he glanced teasingly at Alice, who had just entered the room.
“I could never respect you if you did!” she said, spiritedly. “I am persuaded better things of you.”
A teasing rejoinder was all she got out of him. The matter was never brought up again by any of us. When Election Day came, I was too proud to seem inquisitive. But in my inmost soul I was assured that reticence boded no good to my hope of one gallant gentleman’s vote for Bell and Everett.
Months afterward, when we were once again of one mind with respect to the nation’s peril and the nation’s need, he told me that he had kept his own counsel, not only because the truth might grieve me, but that party feeling ran so high in his church he thought it best not to intimate to any one how he meant to vote.
“And, like Harry Percy’s wife, I could be trusted not to tell what I did not know?” said I.
“You might have been catechised,” he admitted. “There are times when the Know-nothing policy is the safest.”