Part 4 (2/2)
”Make him take it back; make him recant; swing him over the last week before election. Make him eat his words with every sign of exquisite relish. Simple enough!”
”How?” persisted Mr. Evans.
”Wiles, tricks, subterfuges, chicanery--understand what I mean?”
”Sure! I understand what you mean as well as you do, but--come down to bra.s.s tacks.”
”That's an entirely different matter,” conceded Uncle Martin gruffly.
”It may take thought.”
”Oh, is that all? Very well then; we'll think. I, myself, will think.
First, I'll have a talk with the sodden amorist. I'll grill him. I'll find the weak spot in his armor. There must be something we can put over on him.”
”By fair means or foul,” insisted Uncle Martin as they paused at the parting of their ways. ”Low-down, underhanded work--do you get what I mean?”
”I do, I do!” declared young Mr. Evans and broke once more into the buoyant stride of an earlier moment. This buoyance was interrupted but once, and briefly, ere he gained the haven of his office.
As he stepped quite too buoyantly into Fountain Square, he was all but run down by the new six-cylinder roadster of Mrs. Harvey Herrington, driven by the enthusiastic owner. He regained the curb in time, with a ready and heartfelt utterance nicely befitting the emergency.
The president of the Whitewater Women's Club, the Munic.i.p.al League and the Suffrage Society, brought her toy to a stop fifteen feet beyond her too agile quarry, with a fine disregard for brakes and tire surfaces.
She beckoned eagerly to him she might have slain. She was a large woman with an air of graceful but resolute authority; a woman good to look upon, attired with all deference to the modes of the moment, and exhaling an agreeable sense of good-will to all.
”Be careful always to look before you start across and you'll never have to say such things,” was her greeting to Mr. Evans, as he halted beside this minor juggernaut.
”Sorry you heard it,” lied the young man readily.
”Such a flexible little car--picks up before one realizes,” conceded Whitewater's acknowledged social dictator. ”But what I wanted to say is this: that poor daft partner of yours has mortally offended every woman in town except three, with that silly screed of his. I've seen nearly all of them that count this morning, or they've called me by telephone.
Now, why couldn't he have had the advice of some good, capable woman before committing himself so rabidly?”
”Who were the three?” queried Mr. Evans.
”Oh, poor Genevieve, of course; she goes without saying. And you'd guess the other two if you knew them better--his cousin, Alys Brewster-Smith, and poor Genevieve's Cousin Emelene. They both have his horrible school-boy composition committed to memory, I do believe.
”Cousin Emelene recited most of it to me with tears in her weak eyes, and Alys tells me his n.o.ble words have made the world seem like a different place to her. She said she had been coming to believe that chivalry of the old true brand was dying out, but that dear Cousin George has renewed her faith in it.
”Think of poor Genevieve when they both fall on his neck. They're going up for that particular purpose this afternoon. The only two in town, mind you, except poor Genevieve. Oh, it's too awfully bad, because aside from this medieval view of his, George was probably as acceptable for this office as any man could be.”
The lady burdened the word ”man” with a tiny but distinguishable emphasis. Mr. Evans chose to ignore this.
”George's friends are going to take him in hand,” said he. ”Of course he was foolish to come out the way he has, even if he did say only what every man believes in his secret heart.”
The president of the Whitewater Woman's Club fixed him with a glittering and suddenly hostile eye.
”What! you too?” she flung at him. He caught himself. He essayed explanations, modifications, a better lighting of the thing. But at the expiration of his first blundering sentence Mrs. Herrington, with her flexible little car, was narrowly missing an aged and careless pedestrian fifty yards down the street.
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