The remaining callers appeared together in his reverie—­Vaden and Diggs.  They were never mentioned apart, and they never worked singly.  They were honest men, whose honesty was dangerous because it went with dull credulity.  In appearance they were so unlike as to make the connection ludicrous.  Vaden was long, emaciated, with a shrunken chest in which a consumptive cough rattled.  His face was scholarly, pallid, pleasant to look at, and there was a sympathetic quality in his voice which carried with it a reminder of past bereavements.  Beside the sentimental languor which enveloped him, Diggs loomed grotesquely fair and florid, with eyes bulging with joviality, and red, repellent, almost gluttonous lips.  He was a teller of stories and a maker of puns.

They were both honest men and ardent Democrats, but they were in the leading strings of sharper politicians.  Perhaps, after all, the fools were more to be feared than the villains.

Somewhere in the city a clock rang the hour, and, as his pipe died out, he rose and went to his desk.

The next morning Vaden and Diggs dropped in to breakfast, and before it was over he had ascertained that they were seeking to sound him upon his attitude towards the recent National Party Platform.  As he dodged their laboured cross-examination he laughed at the overdone assumption of indifference.  Before they had risen from the table, Rann joined them, and the conversation branched at once into impersonal topics.  Diggs told a story or two, at which Rann roared appreciatively, while Vaden fingered his coffee spoon in pensive abstraction.

As they left the dining-room, which was in the basement, and ascended to the hall, Diggs glanced into the reception-rooms and nodded respectfully at the brocaded chairs.

“I like the looks of that, governor,” he said, “but it’s a pity you can’t find a wife.  A woman gives an air to things, you know.”  Then he cocked an eye at the ceiling.  “This old house ain’t much more than a fire trap, anyway,” he added.  “The trouble is it’s gotten old-fashioned just like the Capitol building over there.  My constituents are all in favour of doing the proud thing by Virginia and giving her a real up-to-date State House.  Bless my life, the old Commonwealth deserves a brownstone front—­now don’t she?”

He appealed to Rann, who dissented in his broad, if blunt, intelligence.

“I wouldn’t trade that old building for all the brownstone between here and New York harbour,” he declared.

The governor laughed abstractedly, but a week later he recalled the proposition as he sat in Juliet Galt’s drawing-room, and repeated it for the sake of her frank disgust.

“I shall tell Eugie,” she exclaimed.  “Eugie finds everything so new that she suffers a perpetual homesickness for Kingsborough.”

“There’s nobody left down there except the judge and Mrs. Webb,” broke in Carrie; “and you know she gets on dreadfully with Mrs. Webb—­now doesn’t she, Aunt Sally?”