Page:The Plutocrat (1927).pdf/70

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and be able to pick you out o' the crowd whenever we all want to go somewhere for a nice song and a little conviviality. That is, if my wife only stays sick long enough, poor woman!"

Then, seeing his friends disposed as he wished, he seated himself in the deep chair facing them, and, appearing to find life genial and his surroundings benevolent, looked beamingly about the room. His glance fell upon the chilling faces of Macklyn and Albert Jones, who had turned and were looking at him over the back of the divan; and his recognition of them was cordial. "Howdy, boys!" he said, with a wave of the hand that included the frigid Ogle. "I see you never get very far away from the bar." After that, unconscious of any rebuff, as the three heads turned stonily away, his gaze moved on, and, becoming aware of Mme. Momoro, remained arrested there. "Well, you wouldn't have seen it in the old days," he said, in pointedly approving reference to her; "yet I don't know but what it's right pleasant, after all—ladies sittin' around among us and playin' cards and everything, right in the barroom."

For a moment Ogle held his breath. It was not a mitigation of the man's offence that he had no offensive intention; lightnings should have destroyed the