“I believe the credit of raking the protoplasmic germ out of the slums of Chicago, where we were then sojourning, belongs to my wife’s sister, Miss Alling. The atmosphere of our home has warmed into growth latent possibilities, I fancy. It was a white day for poor Tony when the gutter-wash landed him at our door. Even now he has physical weaknesses and mental deficiencies that make him a striking object-lesson as to the terrible truths of heredity.”
“How many children have you, Mr. Wayt?” questioned March, with irrelevance verging upon abruptness.
“George W. Cable’s number—five. You may recall the witty puzzle he set for a Massachusetts Sunday School. ‘I have five children,’ he said, ‘and half of them are girls. What is the half of five?’ ‘Two and a half,’ came from the perplexed listeners. It transpired, eventually, that the other half were girls also.”
He was an entertaining man, or would have been had he been colloquial instead of hortatory. Yet what he said was telling rather from the degree of importance he evidently attached to it than from the worth of the matter. In a smaller speaker, his style would have been airy. Standing, as he did, six feet in his slippers, he was always nearly—occasionally, quite—imposing. Men of his profession seldom converse well. The habit of hebdomadal speech-making runs over and saturates the six working days. Pastoral visitation is undoubtedly measurably responsible for the trick of talking as for duty’s sake, and to a roomful. The essential need of the public speaker is audience, and to this, actual or visionary, he is prone to address himself. Mr. Wayt could not bid an acquaintance “Good-morning,” in a chance encounter upon boat or car, without embracing every passenger within the scope of his orotund tones, in the salutation. A poseur during his waking hours, he probably continued to cater to the ubiquitous audience in his dreams.
“Come out for a turn on the piazza, May!” proposed March, after the guest had taken his leave.
The night was filled with divine calm. The Gilchrist house surmounted a knoll from which the beautiful town rolled away on all sides. In the distance a glistening line showed where the bay divided Jersey meadows from the ramparts of the Highlands. The turf of the lawn was ringed and crossed by beds of hyacinths and tulips. The buds of the great horse-chestnut trees were big with promise; the finer tracery of the elms against the moonlit sky showed tufts of tender foliage. Faint, delicious breaths of sweetness met brother and sister at the upper end of their walk, telling that the fruit trees were ablow.
“East or West, Hame is Best!”
quoted March, taking in a mighty draught of satisfaction. “Not that I brought you out here to listen to stale Scotch rhymes. Don’t annoy the precious mother by letting her into the secret, May, but Mr. Wayt is the man I saw in the restaurant to-day, and I believe that was his family!”