He saw it all now. He had been, in
some vague way, deluded. He had given confidential audience to the niece
of one of the Great Claimants before Congress. The inevitable axe had
come to the grindstone. What might not this woman dare ask of him?
He was the more implacable that he felt he had already been
prepossessed--and honestly prepossessed--in her favor. He was angry with
her for having pleased him. Under the icy polish of his manner there
were certain Puritan callosities caused by early straight-lacing. He was
not yet quite free from his ancestor's cheerful ethics that Nature,
as represented by an Impulse, was as much to be restrained as Order
represented by a Quaker.
Without apparently noticing his manner, Carmen went on, with a certain
potential freedom of style, gesture, and manner scarcely to be indicated
in her mere words. "You know, then, I am of Spanish blood, and that,
what was my adopted country, our motto was, 'God and Liberty.' It was
of you, sir,--the great Emancipator,--the apostle of that Liberty,--the
friend of the down-trodden and oppressed,--that I, as a child, first
knew.
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