Читать книгу The 13th District. A Story of a Candidate онлайн

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The judge looked at McFarlane with the glance that terminates the interviews of a busy man, especially a man busy in corporation interests, where the personal equation may be largely ignored, and waited for McFarlane to leave.

McFarlane went down the stairs, chuckling.

“He took the bit all right,” he said to the man who was waiting for him. “Let’s go have a nice little drink.”

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ETHAN HARKNESS was sitting in his library, as the architect who had remodeled his old house had named the pleasant apartment that opened off the living-room. Here, out of deference to the idea, Emily had her books, as well as the few her father read, disposed upon low shelves; and here the old man passed his hours at home, because, as he loved to say, in his whimsical pretense that he was in the way, he would bother no one. His habit was to sit here every evening and smoke his cigar over his newspaper. Perhaps he would read some book Emily had urged upon him, though he never liked the books she recommended. Once in every year he read Scott’s novels through, at least he was one of those persons of whom that highly colored tale is told. Emily, in her new appreciation of the realistic, had joined in the cultured revolt against the romantic school, and would not own to the least respect for Scott. Once in a while, when her father, in his devices to induce her to read the Wizard, would complain of his eyes hurting him, and ask her to read Rob Roy to him, she would do so until he nodded, and then when he had gone to bed, would take the book to her room and read until the house was still and cold with the silence and chill of midnight, so that she was afraid to move. But such occasions she declared to be literary debauches, and would tell her father at breakfast that she was ashamed of herself.