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Lapham and Irene to come down from above before going into the drawing-room, he stood staring at his hands, now open and now shut, and breathing hard. He heard quiet talking beyond the portiere within, and presently Tom Corey came out. "Ah, Colonel Lapham! Very glad to see you." Lapham shook hands with him and gasped, "Waiting for Mis' Lapham," to account for his presence.
"What did I tell you?" he said, nodding significantly at Wilhelmina and grabbing up the damning papers. "That'll do for you," he said to Lapham. "We'll have you in the Pen for this." And when Lapham and Eells both rushed at him at once he struck them aside with one hand. For they did not come on fighting, but all in a tremble, clutching wildly to get back the papers.
Lapham met the Englishman's eye, and with difficulty kept himself from winking. Then he looked away, and tried to find out where he stood, or what he wanted to do. He could hardly tell. He had expected to come into that room and unmask Rogers, and have it over. But he had unmasked Rogers without any effect whatever, and the play had only begun.
"DEAR MRS. LAPHAM: "Will you and General Lapham " "I didn't know I was a general," grumbled Lapham. "I guess I shall have to be looking up my back pay. Who is it writes this, anyway?" he asked, turning the letter over for the signature. "Oh, never mind. Read it through!" cried his wife, with a kindling glance of triumph at Penelope, and he resumed
"No, sir," answered Lapham, withdrawing his eyes from a long stare at Bartley, in which he had been seeing himself a young man again, in the first days of his married life. "I went right back to Lumberville and sold out everything, and put all I could rake and scrape together into paint. And Mis' Lapham was with me every time. No hang back about HER. I tell you she was a WOMAN!" Bartley laughed.
On the Republican side were Aldrich, Conger, Frye, Hawley, and Lapham, qualifying themselves for service in the Senate; the burly Robeson, ready to defend his acts as Secretary of the Navy; Judge Kelley, of Philadelphia, who had come down from a former generation; Rainey and Smalls, emancipated men and brethren; the witty Tom.
There was a moment in which the weight had the effect of poising before it fell; then it dropped with a mighty whack on the iron-bound head of the pile, and drove it a foot into the earth. "By gracious!" he would say, "there ain't anything like that in THIS world for BUSINESS, Persis!" Mrs. Lapham suffered him to enjoy the sight twenty or thirty times before she said, "Well, now drive on, Si."
Rogers went on quietly: "You're not obliged to sell to these parties when you meet them; but you've allowed me to commit myself to them by the promise that you would talk with them." "'Twan't a promise," said Lapham. "It was the same thing; they have come out from England on my guaranty that there was such and such an opening for their capital; and now what am I to say to them?
The long procession of lamps on the beautiful street was flaring in the clear red of the sunset towards which it marched, and Lapham, with a lump in his throat, stopped in front of his house and looked at their multitude.
But she was even then still very young, and her life at Lapham had been varied by visits to the West. It had also been varied by an invitation, made with the politest resolution by Mrs. Corey, to visit in Boston, which the girl was equal to refusing in the same spirit. Sewell was intensely interested in the moral spectacle which Lapham presented under his changed conditions.
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