Colonel Ramsay asked
her politics and she confessed that she had none. She had inherited
Republican prejudices from her grandfather, and most of the girls she
had known in college were of Republican antecedents; but she liked to
call herself an independent.
"You'd better not be a Democrat, Sylvia," Mrs. Owen warned her. "I
suffered a good deal in my husband's lifetime from being one. There are
still people in this town who think a Democrat's the same as a Rebel or
a Copperhead. It ain't hardly respectable yet, being a Democrat, and if
they don't all of 'em shut up about the 'fathers' and the Constitution,
I'm going to move to Mexico where it's all run by niggers."
Sylvia had singled out several figures in the drama enacting below for
special attention. The chairman had interested her by reason of his
attitude of scrupulous fairness, in which she now saw the transparent
irony; the banalities of the temporary chairman had touched her humor;
she watched him for the rest of the morning with a kind of awe that any
one could he so dull, so timorous, and yet be chosen to address nearly
two thousand American citizens on an occasion of importance. She was
unable to reconcile Thatcher's bald head, ruddy neck, and heavy
shoulders with Marian's description of the rich man's son, who dreamed
of heroes and played at carpentry.
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