"How are you?"--this quite in the Ilseboro manner. "Are you staying near here?" You might have counted one-two before he betrayed the least sign of having heard her. Then he said, "Yes, I live about ten miles from here." "Oh, of course! You're a judge or something like that, aren't you?" Was the man a little deaf? "Something like that." She noted that trick of pausing a second or two before answering. Ilseboro had had it too. It was rather effective in a way. It made the other person wonder if what he had said was foolish. He wasn't deaf a bit--quite the contrary. "Aren't you going to tell me what you are?" she said. He shook his head gravely. Then her eye fell on Gore standing at her elbow and she couldn't resist the temptation. She turned her back on Eleanor's discovery. "Hullo, Mr. Gore! Did you expect to meet a barbarian at dinner--especially a futile one?" Gore, unabashed, took the whole room in. "Now," he said in his high-pitched voice, "could anything be more barbarous than that attack? Oh, yes, I said it; and what's worse, I think it, my dear young lady--I think it!" She turned back to O'Bannon. "Would you think I was a barbarian?" "Certainly not a futile one," he answered. They went in to dinner. It was a fixed principle of Fanny Piers' life to put her women friends next to their own young men, so that Eleanor found herself next to O'Bannon at dinner. He was on his hostess' right, Gore on her left, then Lydia and Tim and May and Piers, and Eleanor again. The arrangement suited Lydia very well. She went on baiting Gore. It suited Eleanor even better. She had known Noel Piers far too long to waste any time talking to him, and as this was the arrangement he preferred, they were almost friends. This left her free to talk to O'Bannon. Her native ability, joined to her personal interest in him, made her familiar with every aspect of his work. He talked shop to her and loved it. He was telling her of a case in which labor unions, with whose aims he himself as an individual was in sympathy, had made themselves amenable to the law. That was one of the penalties of a position like his. Piers caught a few words and leaned over. "Well, I'm pretty liberal," he said--that well-known opening of the reactionary--"but I'm not in favor of labor." "Not even for others, Noel," said Eleanor, who did not want to be interrupted. "I mean labor unions," replied Piers, who, though not without humor in its proper place, had too much difficulty in expressing an idea to turn aside to laugh about it. "I hope you'll be firm with those fellows, O'Bannon. I hope you're not a socialist like Eleanor." Piers had used the word "socialist" as a hate word, and expected to hear O'Bannon repudiate the suggestion as an insult. Instead he denied it as a fact.