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."

A rather superior specimen of the professional politician, but
distinctly of that hypocritical, slippery class. And Margaret's
conviction was strengthened later in the day when she came upon
him at tea at Mrs. Houghton's. He was holding forth noisily
against "society," was denouncing it as a debaucher of manhood and
womanhood, a waster of precious time, and on and on in that trite
and tedious strain. Margaret's lip curled as she listened. What
did this fakir know about manhood and womanhood? And could there
be any more pitiful, more paltry wasting of time than in studying
out and performing such insincerities as his life was made up of?