“O Mr. Harrington, indeed I can’t agree with you,” returned Mrs. Atkins with feeble excitement. “These things are unpleasant, I admit, but Mr. Webster is a great statesman, you know—oh, there never was such a statesman as Mr. Webster! He’s perfectly splendid, and I’m sure if he was to have all the negroes in the country killed—the horrid creatures!—I’m sure I would like him just as much as ever. Indeed I would, and so would Mr. Atkins. O if you’d only heard Mr. Webster at Faneuil Hall last Saturday, I know you’d have been converted. He didn’t say a word about politics, and he was so majestic, and so venerable and so—so pleasant—oh, it was beautiful!”
And Mrs. Atkins fanned herself in a feeble fluster of admiration for Mr. Webster, whose speech, by the way, had been very decrepit, rambling, and dull, with only a touch here and there of the true Websterian massive power and energy.
“Well, Mrs. Atkins,” said Witherlee in his cool, polite, provoking way, “for my part, I don’t understand how you can admire Mr. Webster’s private life, I’m sure.”
This change in the venue, as the lawyers say, and this impudent assumption that Mrs. Atkins had been admiring Mr. Webster’s private life, were both highly characteristic of the good Fernando. His remark was not prompted by even the pale esthetic anti-slavery, which he sometimes indulged in, but by the simple desire to say something which he knew would aggravate the lady. And Mrs. Atkins was aggravated, for she colored and fanned herself nervously.
“I don’t know what you refer to, Mr. Witherlee,” she remarked, pettishly.
“Why, you know what Mr. Webster’s habits are, Mrs. Atkins,” said Fernando, lifting his eyebrows with an air of painful regret, in which there was also a bilious sneer. “You are aware of his excessive fondness for old Otard. And then his relations to women”—
“I don’t care,” interrupted Mrs. Atkins, bridling with faint excitement. “I don’t care at all, and I think that God gave Mr. Webster some faults to remind us that he is mortal.”
This was smart for Mrs. Atkins, and Witherlee, somewhat nonplused, turned pale with spite, and lifted his eyebrows, and shrugged his shoulders with a manner that was equivalent to saying—Oh, if you talk in that way, Mrs. Atkins, there’s no use in wasting words upon you. His manner would have been ineffably maddening to most men, but women are less easily transported beyond control, and Mrs. Atkins, conscious that she had the advantage of Mr. Witherlee in her reply, fanned herself equably and took no notice of his insulting gesture.
“For my part,” said Harrington, gravely offended by Witherlee’s remarks, “I deprecate any reflections upon Mr. Webster’s private life. It seems to me that our concern is with his public acts, and not with his personal habits.”