It was beyond Sharlee’s power to controvert this diagnosis.  Mr. Queed had in fact impressed her as the most frankly and grossly self-centred person she had ever seen in her life.  But unlike West, her uppermost feeling in regard to him was a strong sense of pity.  She knew things about his life that West did not know and probably never would.  For though the little Doctor of Mrs. Paynter’s had probably not intended to give her a confidence, and certainly had no right to do so, she had thus regarded what he said to her in the dining-room that night, and of his pathetic situation in regard to a father she never meant to say a word to anybody.

“I sized him up for a remarkable man,” said she, “when I saw the wonderful way he sat upon his hat that afternoon.  Don’t you remember?  He struck me then as the most natural, unconscious, and direct human being I ever saw—­don’t you think that?—­and now think of his powers of concentration.  All his waking time, except what he gives to the Post, goes to that awful book of his.  He is ridiculous now because his theory of life is ridiculous.  But suppose it popped into his head some day to switch all that directness and concentrated energy in some other direction.  Don’t you think he might be rather a formidable young person?”

West conceded that there might be something in that.  And happening to glance across the flower-sweet table at the moment, he was adroitly detached and re-attached by the superbly “finished” Miss Avery.

The little dinner progressed.  Nor was this the only spot in town where evening meals were going forward amid stimulating talk.  Far away over the town, at the same hour, the paying guests of Mrs. Paynter’s were gathered about her hospitable board, plying the twin arts of supping and talking.  And as Sharlee’s fellow-diners talked of Mr. Queed, it chanced that Mr. Queed’s fellow-suppers were talking of Sharlee, or at any rate of her family’s famous misfortune.  Mr. Queed, it is true, did not appreciate this fact, for the name of the female agent who had taken his Twenty from him could not have been more unknown to him if she had been a dweller in Phrygia or far Cappadocia.

Major Brooke told, not by request, one of his well-known stories about how he had flouted and routed the Republicans in 1875.  The plot of these stories was always the same, but the setting shifted about here and there, and this one had to do with a county election in which, the Major said, the Republicans and negroes had gone the limit trying to swindle the Democrats out of the esteemed offices.

“And I said, ’You’—­the ladies will excuse me, I’m sure—­’You lying rascal,’ s’ I, ’don’t you dare to contradict me!  You’re all tarred with the same pitch,’ s’ I.  ’Everything you touch turns corrupt and rotten.  Look at Henry G. Surface,’ s’ I.  ’The finest fellow God ever made, till the palsied hand of Republicanism fell upon him, and now cankering and rotting in jail—­’”