What was he in her eyes but a man
who had needed to be told that she did not love him! Had he not better--
and more courteously to her--have avoided the meeting which was
necessarily an embarrassment to her? But no; he must rush like a Mohawk
till he found her and forced her to rebuff him, to veil her kindness in
little manners, to remind him that he put himself in the character of a
rejected importunate. She had punished him enough, perhaps a little too
cruelly enough, in leaving him with the man to whom she handed bouquets as
a matter of course. And this man was one whose success had long been a
trumpet at his ear, blaring loudly of his own failure in the same career.
It had been several years since he first heard of the young editor of the
Rouen "Journal," and nowadays almost everybody knew about Brainard
Macauley. Outwardly, he was of no unusual type: an American of affairs;
slight, easy, yet alert; relaxed, yet sharp; neat, regular, strong; a
quizzical eye, a business chin, an ambitious head with soft, straight hair
outlining a square brow; and though he was "of a type," he was not
commonplace, and one knew at once that he would make a rattling fight to
arrive where he was going.
It appeared that he had heard of Harkless, as well as the Carlow editor of
him. They had a few moments of shop, and he talked to Harkless as a
brother craftsman, without the offense of graciousness, and spoke of his
pleasure in the meeting and of his relief at Harkless's recovery, for,
aside from the mere human feeling, the party needed him in Carlow--even if
he did not always prove himself "quite a vehement partisan.
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