voce_, his glance veering again to
Lindsay's face), "and you know that Jewish families have religious
scruples about portraits of any sort" (pauses, exhausted).

_Chuck_ (with heavy artillery). "Alice, _taisez-vous_. You're doing
poorly. You can't converse. Your best parlor trick is your red hair.
Miss Lee, I'll show you a picture of Mrs. Rudd some day, and I'll tell
you now what she looks like. She has exquisite melancholy gray eyes, a
mouth like a ripe tomato" (shouts from the table _en masse_, but Chuck
ploughs along cheerily), "hair like the braided midnight" (cries of
"What's that?" and "Hear! Hear!"), "a figure slim and willowy as a
vaulting-pole" (a protest of "No track athletics at meals; that's
forbidden!"), "and a voice--well, if you ever tasted New Orleans
molasses on maple sugar, with 'that tired feeling' thrown in, perhaps
you'll have a glimpse, a mile off, of what that voice is like." (Eager
exclamations of "That's near enough," "Don't do it any more, Chuck," and
"For Heaven's sake, Charlie, stop." Lindsay looks hard with the gray
eyes at the Governor.)

_Lindsay_, "Why don't you pull your bowie-knife out of your boot,
Governor? It looks like he's making fun of your wife, to me. Isn't
anybody going to fight anybody?"

And then Mr. McNaughton would reprove her as a bloodthirsty Kentuckian,
and the whole laughing tableful would empty out on the broad porch. At
such a time the Governor, laughing too, amused, yet uncomfortable, and
feeling himself in a false and undignified position, would vow solemnly
that a stop must be put to all this. It would get about, into the papers
even, by horrid possibility; even now a few intimates of the McNaughton
family had been warned "not to kill the Governor's wife." He would
surely tell the girl the next time he could find her alone, and then the
absurdity would collapse. But the words would not come, or if he
carefully framed them beforehand, this bold, aggressive leader of men,
whose nickname was "Jack the Giant-killer," made a giant of Lindsay's
displeasure, and was afraid of it. He had never been afraid of anything
before. He would screw his courage up to the notch, and then, one look
at the childlike face, and down it would go, and he would ask her to go
rowing with him. They were such good friends; it was so dangerous to
change at a blow existing relations, to tell her that he had been
deceiving her all these weeks. These exquisite June weeks that had flown
past to