"Oh, come," said Truesdale, shrugging his shoulders, as he cast on Brower
and his circle a look half of expostulation and half of embarrassment,
"I'm not entitled to annoy your friends with any such filthy trifle as
_that_. Besides, I don't claim it as any grievance of _mine_." He
thought, privately, that his mother's disposition to dicker with the
populace was no more creditable than necessary; he could take no great
pleasure in dwelling upon it too lingeringly.
"Oh, go ahead," urged Brower; "our fellows here are interested in just
that sort of thing. If you should want to come in, we'll take it as your
initiation."
"Do," added another member. "I believe that for every one man who leaves
the polling-place with a waning confidence in the present and a clouded
hope for the future, there are scores who thus leave the lower courts of
justice."
"Oh, very well," replied Truesdale, throwing out his hands in his light
French fashion. And he recounted the whole chain of circumstances which
had so exasperated his father and baffled his brother, from the first
panting appearance of frowzy old Mother Van Horn on his own mother's
door-step down to the forfeiture of the fictitious bail-bond by her two
grandnephews. He gave his narrative in a series of light, graphic,
delicate touches. He almost saw it print itself before his very eyes,
like a page from one of those beautiful little volumes made by Hachette
or by Lemerre--those sprightly, broken pages, where a paragraph consists
of a line or even a word, where brief exclamatory phrases abound, and
where short rows of dots leave the reader to complete the meaning at his
own pleasure.
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