see about the carriages." He turned to Burnamy:
"Will you order them?"
"Oh," said the young fellow, with a sort of dryness, "the portier will
get them."
"I don't understand why General Triscoe was so willing to accept. Surely,
he can't like that man!" said Mrs. March to her husband in their own
room.
"Oh, I fancy that wouldn't be essential. The general seems to me, capable
of letting even an enemy serve his turn. Why didn't you speak, if you
didn't want to go?"
"Why didn't you?"
"I wanted to go."
"And I knew it wouldn't do to let Miss Triscoe go alone; I could see that
she wished to go."
"Do you think Burnamy did?"
"He seemed rather indifferent. And yet he must have realized that he
would be with Miss Triscoe the whole afternoon."
XXXV.
If Burnamy and Miss Triscoe took the lead in the one-spanner, and the
others followed in the two-spanner, it was not from want of politeness on
the part of the young people in offering to give up their places to each
of their elders in turn. It would have been grotesque for either March or
Stoller to drive with the girl; for her father it was apparently no
question, after a glance at the more rigid uprightness of the seat in the
one-spanner; and he accepted the place beside Mrs. March on the back seat
of the two-spanner without demur. He asked her leave to smoke, and then
he scarcely spoke to her. But he talked to the two men in front of him
almost incessantly, haranguing them upon the inferiority of our
conditions and the futility of our hopes as a people, with the effect of
bewildering the cruder arrogance of Stoller, who could have got on with
Triscoe's contempt for the worthlessness of our working-classes, but did
not know what to do with his scorn of the vulgarity and venality of their
employers. He accused some of Stoller's most honored and envied
capitalists of being the source of our worst corruptions, and guiltier
than the voting-cattle whom they bought and sold.
"I think we can get rid of the whole trouble if we go at it the right
way," Stoller said, diverging for the sake of the point he wished to
bring in. "I believe in having the government run on business principles.
They've got it here in Carlsbad, already, just the right sort of thing,
and it works. I been lookin' into it, and I got this young man,
yonder"--he twisted his hand in the direction of the one-spanner! "to
help me put it in shape. I believe it's going to make our folks think,
t
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