"I should like to put that to the test some night."
"Not I, Miss Grey. I have no poetry in me. I am cold prose through and through."
"You—you!" she cried. "Some people like poetry—some people are poetry."
"What—what?"
"Wasn't your hero Cromwell just magnificent, stately blank verse?"
"What confounded nonsense!" She glanced at the manly figure with the cavalry seat, erect, handsome, to her heroic—an ideal gentleman in all his ways. "Stuff and nonsense!" he added.
"Well, Uncle Jim—to talk prose—the elections please you?"
"Yes. The North is stiffening up. It is as well. Did you see what Seward said, 'An irrepressible conflict,' and that man Lincoln, 'The house divided against itself cannot stand'? Now I should like to think them both wrong."
"And do you not?" she asked.
"No. Some devilish fate seems to be at the helm, as Rivers says. We avoid one rock to fall into wild breakers of exasperation; with fugitive-slave cases on one side, and on the other importations of slaves. Where will it end?"