Those who had never seen him had at least heard about him. Some of them
had visited his pictures at the Art Institute, and, as devotees of the
old school, if of any, had mildly guyed them. Others had read paragraphs
in the "Chappie Chat" of the newspapers about his trousers and
cravats--those genial paragraphs which may so easily endow a young man of
parts and peculiarities with a quasi-celebrity. One of them now smiled
broadly, and another so far forgot himself and his dignity as to wink;
but all the rest, as American freemen by birth or adoption, united in a
stolid determination to refrain from seeing, or at least from
acknowledging, any distinguishing peculiarity, any differentiation--above
all, any savor of superiority. The one of whom Truesdale inquired for his
father was so Spartan in his brusqueness that Truesdale, despite himself,
smiled in his face.
In the private office he found his father closeted with Roger. Crumpled
and trampled on the floor, and with the effect of a matter abandoned or
at least superseded, lay a large sheet of paper printed with the outlines
of a real-estate subdivision, while a hundred similar sheets rested in a
roll on the end of the old man's desk. Marshall himself lay back in his
chair, with marks of the exhaustion that follows intense indignation and
exasperation, while Roger paced the floor with all the vehemence and
choler of younger blood.
"Yes," Roger was saying, explosively, "the bond was opened, and all they
found was a blank paper--the alderman's name, and nothing more.
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