rt 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, the best ones among them. Here!" He drew a newspaper
out of his pocket, folded to show two columns in their full