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Bagnet, otherwise as immovable as a pump or a lamp-post, puts his large right hand on the top of his bald head as if to defend it from a shower-bath and looks with great uneasiness at Mrs. Bagnet. "George," says that old girl, "I wonder at you! George, I am ashamed of you! George, I couldn't have believed you would have done it!
You can't have all the men there are. You're envious!" "Me, envious!" Rosario retorted. "Envious of your reputation, I suppose, the best in the Cabañal, as even the lamp-post knows! Thanks! I'm a decent woman, I am, I never tried to get another girl's husband!" "And whose husband could you get with that sculpin-face? No, dearest, no one is jealous of you!"
It suddenly occurred to Winn that what he was feeling now was unhappiness, a funny thing; he had never really felt before. It was the kind of feeling the man had had, under the lamp-post at the station, carrying his dying wife. The idea of a broken heart had always seemed to Winn namby-pamby. You broke if you were weak; you didn't break if you were strong.
"Gibbie! how could you?" she cried almost in a scream, and pushing away his arm, turned from him and tried to run, but after two steps, tottered to the lamp-post, and leaned against it with such a scared look! "Then come with me and be my sister, Ginevra, and I will take care of you," spelled Gibbie. "I can do nothing to take care of you while I can't get near you."
His single mind, always torn to some extent between an ingrained loyalty to his employers and those politics of his which differed from his paper's, had vented itself twice since coming on his stand; once in these words to the seller of "Pell Mells": "I stupulated with you not to come beyond the lamp-post.
And now, at hard upon half after six o'clock, post-meridian, the dangerous dews of night already beginning to fall, he leaned against a lamp-post, a physical wreck, with a long block and a half still separating him from the comforts of home. At the next corner but one above rose the red brick Ottoman, its inviting side stretching for many yards down the street towards him.
We will quarrel and there will be talk of hanging. Then they will come again bearing a rope in their hands." Doctor Parcival shook with fright. "I have a presentiment," he declared emphatically. "It may be that what I am talking about will not occur this morning. It may be put off until tonight but I will be hanged. Everyone will get excited. I will be hanged to a lamp-post on Main Street."
But no sooner had this thought enhanced his irritation than he had its refutation in the discovery of the chauffeur affectionately embracing a lamp-post three or four doors away, toward Sixth Avenue; and so singular seemed this sight that P. Sybarite wondered if, by any chance, the fellow had found time to get drunk during so brief a wait.
Waiter! raw beef-steak for the gentleman's eye nothing like raw beef-steak for a bruise, sir; cold lamp-post very good, but lamp-post inconvenient damned odd standing in the open street half an hour, with your eye against a lamp-post eh, very good ha! ha! And the stranger, without stopping to take breath, swallowed at a draught full half a pint of the reeking brandy-and-water, and flung himself into a chair with as much ease as if nothing uncommon had occurred.
Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time.
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