“That’s talkin’ business!”
shouted Penrod. “Everybody keep still a
minute. Everybody!”
He took command of the situation at once, displaying
a fine capacity for organization and system.
It needed only a few minutes to set order in the place
of confusion and to determine, with the full concurrence
of all parties, the conditions under which Georgie
Bassett was to defend his claim by undergoing what
may be perhaps intelligibly defined as the Herman
test. Georgie declared he could do it easily.
He was in a state of great excitement and in no condition
to think calmly or, probably, he would not have made
the attempt at all. Certainly he was overconfident.
It was during the discussion of the details of this
enterprise that Georgie’s mother, a short distance
down the street, received a few female callers, who
came by appointment to drink a glass of iced tea with
her, and to meet the Rev. Mr. Kinosling. Mr. Kinosling
was proving almost formidably interesting to the women
and girls of his own and other flocks. What favour
of his fellow clergymen a slight precociousness of
manner and pronunciation cost him was more than balanced
by the visible ecstasies of ladies. They blossomed
at his touch.
He had just entered Mrs. Bassett’s front door,
when the son of the house, followed by an intent and
earnest company of four, opened the alley gate and
came into the yard. The unconscious Mrs. Bassett
was about to have her first experience of a fatal
coincidence. It was her first, because she was
the mother of a boy so well behaved that he had become
a proverb of transcendency. Fatal coincidences
were plentiful in the Schofield and Williams families,
and would have been familiar to Mrs. Bassett had Georgie
been permitted greater intimacy with Penrod and Sam.
Mr. Kinosling sipped his iced tea and looked about,
him approvingly. Seven ladies leaned forward,
for it was to be seen that he meant to speak.
“This cool room is a relief,” he said,
waving a graceful hand in a neatly limited gesture,
which everybody’s eyes followed, his own included.
“It is a relief and a retreat. The windows
open, the blinds closed—that is as it should
be. It is a retreat, a fastness, a bastion against
the heat’s assault. For me, a quiet room—a
quiet room and a book, a volume in the hand, held
lightly between the fingers. A volume of poems,
lines metrical and cadenced; something by a sound Victorian.
We have no later poets.”
“Swinburne?” suggested Miss Beam, an eager
spinster. “Swinburne, Mr. Kinosling?
Ah, Swinburne!”
“Not Swinburne,” said Mr. Kinosling chastely.
“No.”
That concluded all the remarks about Swinburne.
Miss Beam retired in confusion behind another lady;
and somehow there became diffused an impression that
Miss Beam was erotic.
“I do not observe your manly little son,”
Mr. Kinosling addressed his hostess.
