Mr. Sinclair gave his shoulders a just perceptible shrug. "Do you know all the people here?" he asked, observing that Margaret looked searchingly over the company. "Let me play Helen on the walls of Troy, and point out the notables whom you do not know. That antique-cameo-faced gentleman whom you are looking at now is the Rev. Mr. Southard. He is misnamed of course. He should be called after something boreal, Does not he make you shiver? He lives with my cousin, whom I saw you standing beside down there. Louis likes him, or pretends to. Mr. Southard is not so much a modern minister, as a theological reminiscence. He belongs among the crop-heads; I have somewhere heard that he was a wild lad, and is now doing penance. It is likely. One doesn't bar a sheep-fold as one does a prison. He appears to be a little off guard now, for a breath seems to have forgotten predestination. When he looks like that, I am always reminded of something pagan, He'd be horrified, of course, if he knew it. Mark that Olympian look of painless melancholy, and the blue, motionless eye. What a cold, marble face he has! Being too polished to retain heat, he remains unmoved in the midst of enthusiasm. That's philosophy, isn't it? He is one of those who fancy that ceasing to be human, they become superhuman. They mistake the prefix, that's all. But Mr. Southard bristles with virtues. I must own that I never knew a man so forgiving toward other people's enemies."
"I know Mr. Southard well by reputation," Margaret interrupted rather warmly. "He is human, of course, and so, fallible; but every mountain in his soul is a Sinai!"
"Oh! he has his good points," Mr. Sinclair admitted tranquilly. "I have known him to be surprised into a glorious laugh, for which, to be sure, he probably beat himself afterward; and he has a temper that peeps out now and then in a delightfully human fashion. I have detected in him, too, a carnal weakness for French chocolate, and a taste for pictures, even the pictures of the Babylonians. Once I saw him stand five minutes before a faded old painting of Cimabue's; I believe it was a virgin standing between two little boys who leaned to kiss each other, a hand of hers on either head, I don't condemn the man in toto. I like his faults; but I detest his virtues!
"That stout, consequential person, with his chin in his cravat, who as Suckling says of Sir Toby Mathews, is always whispering nothing into somebody's ear, is Mr. ex-councilman Smith. He was thrown to the surface at the time of the Know-Nothing ebullition, and when that was over, was skinned off with the rest of 'em. He considers himself a statesman, and looks forward with prophetic goggle eyes to the time when his party shall be again in the ascendant. He comes here to nurse his wrath, and I haven't a doubt that he feels as though this procession were marching down his throat. He used to be to a joiner, then a house-builder, then he got to be a house-owner. Twenty years ago, my aunt Betsey, who lives in the country, paid him two dollars to build a trellis for her grape-vine, and he did it so well that she gave him his dinner after the family had got through. Now he has a mansion near hers that dwarfs her cottage to a bird-cage. His place is really fine, grounds worth looking at, and a stone house with bronze lions at the door. I don't know what he has lions there for, unless to indicate that Snug the joiner lives within. I'm not afraid of 'em. You've never heard of him here; but out there he is tremendous. 'Imposteur à la Mecque, et prophète à Médine.'
"Still there are people even here who blow about him. Psaphon's birds, of course, fed on Smith's oats, He hates me because he thinks that I laugh at him; but I don't doubt that it soothes his soul to know that the roses on his carpets are twice as large as those on mine, and that he has ten pictures to my one. The first thing you see when the vestibule door opens is a row of portraits, ten of 'em, Smith and his wife, and eight children. Ames painted 'em, and he must have had the nightmare regularly till they were done. They are larger than life, and their eyes move. I am positive that they move. I guess there are little strings behind the canvas. There they hang and stare at you, till you wish they were hanged by the necks. The first time I went there, I shook my fist at 'em behind Smith's back, and he caught me at it. I couldn't help it. The spectacle is enough to excite any man's worst feelings. The parlor walls are covered with landscapes painted from a cow's point of view, strong in grass and clover, with pleasant drinking-places, and large trees to stand under when the sun gets high. I never see such trees and water in nature, but I dare say the cows do. My wife and I dined there once. The eight children sat in two detachments and ate Black Hamburg grapes, skins and all; and the peaches were brought in polished like apples. My wife got into such a giggle that she nearly strangled. I see, you sharp-eyed Bedouin, you want to remind me that I have eaten of this man's salt. True, but he made it as bitter as any that Dante ever tasted.
"That sober, middle-aged man in a complete suit of pepper and salt, hair and all, is Mr. Ames, the member from N——, Polliwog Ames they call him, from his great speech. Is it possible you have never heard of it? It was the speech of the session. Some one had introduced a bill asking an appropriation of ten thousand dollars toward building a new museum of natural history. There was a little palaver on the subject, then Ames got up. All winter nothing had been heard from him but the scriptural yea and nay; so, of course, every one was attentive, 'Gentle-men,' he said, 'while thousands of men, women, and children, in the city, and tens of thousands in the commonwealth, are hungry to-day, and will be hungry to-morrow, and are and will be too poor to buy food; while paupers are crowding our almshouses, and beggars are swarming in our streets; while all this poverty is staring us in the face, and putting to us the problem, how are we to be fed and clothed and sheltered, and kept from crime, and taught to read and to pray? it would seem to me, gentlemen, an unnecessary not to say reprehensible act, to appropriate ten thousand dollars of the public money, in order that some long-nosed professor might be enabled to show us how polliwogs wiggle their tails.' Having said this, Mr. Ames shut his mouth, and sat down covered with glory."
Margaret's only comment was to look earnestly at this man who had remembered the poor.
They were silent a little while; then Mr. Sinclair spoke again, in a lower voice. "I am going to Europe in a few weeks."