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Yet politically he was as absolute as a boss ever is. At once the most abused, hated, dreaded, liked, and respected man in the state, fables without number clustered round his elusive personality. One account would paint him a church deacon, frock-coated, smug; another with cloven hoof.
A frock-coated committee would gravely recommend him for treatment in the mental hospital at Essondale. They would not understand. Hollister covered his face with a swift, tight clasping of his hands. Something rose chokingly in his throat. Into his eyes a slow, scalding wetness crept like a film. He set his teeth in one corner of his pillow.
And when the noble baronet in the chair to her eye, a pompous, frock-coated stick, sacrificing his after-dinner sleep for once, that he might the more effectually secure it in the future proposed a vote of confidence in the Conservative candidate; when the vote was carried with much cheering and rattling of feet; when the Primrose Dames on the platform smiled graciously down upon the meeting as one smiles at good children in their moments of pretty behaviour; and when, finally, scores of toil-stained labourers, young and old, went up to have a word and a hand-shake with "Muster Raeburn," Marcella held herself aloof and cold, with a look that threatened sarcasm should she be spoken to.
A telegraph boy was one; by his side walked, vehemently explaining, a tall, elderly solicitor white-whiskered, drab-spatted, frock-coated, eye-glassed, silk-hatted in every detail the trusted family lawyer. I knew the man by sight, and I knew him by name and repute.
A band was playing vigorously something that sounded like the Star-Spangled Banner, and a group of top-hatted and frock-coated gentlemen were the front figures in a great crowd that covered the station platform.
He was never ignored in the choice of those frock-coated and silk-hatted non-partisan committees that meet all trains at the Union Station, and quadrennially welcome home our eternal candidates for the joyous office of Vice-President of the Republic. He kept his dress suit packed for flight at Fraserville free of that delicate scent of camphor that sweetens the air of provincial festivals.
And I, too, felt a lump in my throat when they sentenced Anastasius Papadopoulos to the asylum, and I saw him for the last time, the living parody of Napoleon III, frock-coated and yellow-gloved, the precious, newly written dossier in his hand, as he disappeared with a mournful smile from the court, after bowing low to the judge and to us, without having understood the significance of anything that had happened.
He put it to her at last, standing squarely before her, his batrachian sallowness unpleasantly flushed, and primitive man looking out of the eyes from which a frock-coated gentleman usually pined at her. "Look here the installment plan's all right; but ain't you a bit behind even on that?" This is good-bye till I get back from Europe." The announcement took her by surprise. "Europe?
The latter, tall-hatted, frock-coated, lavender-trousered, with a cane in his hand and a flower in his button-hole, jumped and dodged wildly to escape the leaping mass, his face puckered with anxiety for the results of his experiment. Pepper's delighted comments drew his eyes upwards, and he made shift to raise his hat, with a smile that was instantly and generously repaid.
These eccentricities the cartoonists seized on and exaggerated so that most people who have not seen the man picture Bryan, not as a determined looking man with a piercing eye and tightset mouth, but as a grotesque frock-coated figure with the sombrero of a cow-puncher and the hair of a poet.
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