"Last fall, I think, I heard he had a plan for enforcing compulsory education in Pennsylvania?"
"Well, yes. I don't know why that didn't pass. It died out. Van Ness was trying, too, to establish a grand scheme for the benefit of the mining population. But somehow I haven't heard of that lately. Oh he's a great man, sir! When I hear him talk half an hour it quite lifts me up to purer air. I always say when I come away, 'Joe Rhodes, you're a selfish scoundrel! A selfish scoundrel!'"
The judge smoked in silence a few minutes. "Yes," he resumed thoughtfully, "it was about Van Ness. Poor Laidley had that reverence for him which men of his calibre are apt to have for a character of perfect excellence, and in his anxiety for Jane he planned that a marriage should be brought about between them. I was to inaugurate the matter—bring them together. Easily, naturally, you understand? The sort of thing that is done every day. I've seen excellent matches made in Virginia by a little quiet management of friends."
"Yes. It is done every day." Mr. Neckart yesterday would have talked of the marriages of half the women he knew as "good matches" or "well managed" without knowing that he was vulgar in so doing. But now the whole idea struck him as loathsome and disgusting. Were women to be paraded before their buyers as in a slave-market? He looked at the poor judge babbling innocently as he might at some venal go-between in the markets of Cairo.
"Thinking the matter over," pursued the judge anxiously, "it has occurred to me that Laidley would not have been so confident of Van Ness's ultimate concurrence in the scheme unless Pliny had shown some prepossession in favor of the little girl."
"You think, then, the sultan is ready to throw the handkerchief?" dryly.
"Oh, that's a coarse way of putting it, Neckart. But, considered as a match, now, really, you know, Van Ness is—The idea that he was favorable to it was suggested to me again yesterday when he proposed that we should look up the captain and call upon him. He is not a man who usually makes advances."
"Is Mr. Van Ness in New York with you?"
"Yes, certainly. I thought you knew that."
"And you propose to take him out to-night?"