She decided that it not only was prudent but also was more enjoyable to keep to herself her amusement at his airs of masculine superiority.  Said she, her manner ingenuous:  “It doesn’t strike me as astonishing that a man should make a sensible speech.”

Grant laughed as if she had said something much cleverer than she could possibly realize.  “That’s a fact,” admitted he.  “It was simply supreme common-sense.  What a world for twaddle it is when common-sense makes us sit up and stare....  But it’s none the less true that you’re prejudiced against him.”

“Why do you say that?”

“If you appreciated him you’d be as enthusiastic as I.”  There was in his tone a faint hint of his unconscious satisfaction in her failure to appreciate Craig.

“You can go very far astray,” said she, “you, with your masculine logic.”

But Grant had guessed aright.  Margaret had not listened attentively to the speech because it interested her less than the man himself.  She had concentrated wholly upon him.  Thus, alone of all the audience, she had seen that Craig was playing a carefully-rehearsed part, and, himself quite unmoved, was watching and profiting by every hint in the countenance of his audience, the old Justices.  It was an admirable piece of acting; it was the performance of a genius at the mummer’s art.  But the power of the mummer lies in the illusion he creates; if he does not create illusion, as Craig did not for Margaret, he becomes mere pantomimist and mouther.  She had never given a moment’s thought to public life as a career; she made no allowances for the fact that a man’s public appearances, no matter how sincere he is, must always be carefully rehearsed if he is to use his powers with unerring effect; she was simply like a child for the first time at the theater, and, chancing to get a glimpse behind the scenes, disgusted and angry with the players because their performance is not spontaneous.  If she had stopped to reason about the matter she would have been less uncompromising.  But in the shock of disillusionment she felt only that the man was working upon his audience like a sleight-of-hand performer; and the longer she observed, and the stronger his spell over the others, the deeper became her contempt for the “charlatan.”  He seemed to her like one telling a lie—­as that one seems, while telling it, to the hearer who is not deceived.  “I’ve been thinking him rough but genuine,” said she to herself.  “He’s merely rough.”  She had forgiven, had disregarded his rude almost coarse manners, setting them down to indifference, the impatience of the large with the little, a revolt from the (on the whole preferable) extreme opposite of the mincing, patterned manners of which Margaret herself was a-weary.  “But he isn’t indifferent at all,” she now felt.  “He’s simply posing.  His rudenesses are deliberate where they are not sheer ignorance.  His manner in court showed that he knows how, in the main.”