Page:The Plutocrat (1927).pdf/67

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mind to, with nobody on earth to tell him he can't, except his wife; and mine's sick, poor woman, thank heaven!" He stopped the duet, putting a hand upon a shoulder of each of the singers. "Gentlemen, I got a toast to propose. Here's to the Atlantic Ocean, the sweet Land of Liberty!"

"There should be a public executioner on board every liner," Macklyn said in a low voice, but with venom. "It's just such fellows as that who make cultivated foreigners think what they do think of Americans. They think he's typical."

"Well, in a way he is," Ogle returned. "At least he's typical of his own type."

Macklyn agreed, frowning, and the three young men stared sombrely at the typical person. Typical or not, the person's appearance, though more than normally jovial under present influences, was not without some impressiveness. He had been at least mannerly enough to remove his fuzzy green cap as a recognition that ladies were present, and the brow revealed beneath his grayish sandy hair was broad, well-shaped, and even of the kind known as commanding; the blue eyes were genial but shrewd, and the other features not at all unpleasant;—on the contrary, they were harmonious and what is commonly called