"She's got an idea that she's got first claim on the place," said the Judge, plumping suddenly into colloquial diction. He had a trick of doing so when he got down to business. It would have had something the effect of candid confession, produced by a maiden's plain-hair days alternated with her waved-hair days, had not the grandiloquence of tone and manner become so far second nature that it ran through both his dialects, and lessened the contrast. "You can't always make a woman see sense." Strong looked suspiciously at him a few seconds. "Well, I'll go see her this evening," he said. "Where's she staying?" "That is a totally superfluous tax on your time, my dear Strong," said the Judge, leaning persuasively across the books again. "I have here a mere formal line, stating that Coakley is the regularly engaged teacher of the school, and will begin next Monday; your signature to it--Green's and mine are already there--will be all that is necessary." He pushed pen and ink toward Strong with his exaggerated air of courtesy. "Oh, I'm not going to sign things that way, you know. I'll go see her." He turned and drew his proof-sheets to him with an air of dismissal. The Judge stood up very straight, expanded his chest, and folded his arms according to his conception of the Virginian manner. "Am I to understand, sir, that you question my veracity?" "I don't question anything," said the young man, impatiently. "I'll know what I'm talking about when I've seen her." "Permit me to suggest, sir"--the Judge was approaching his platform manner--"permit me to suggest, sir, that Mr. Green and myself constitute a majority of the board, and Mr. Green, sir--Uncle Billy Green--has confidence in my honor, and will sustain my action, whatever line you may be persuaded to adopt." "Oh, as to that," said Strong, exaggerating his crispness of manner in protest against the Judge's staginess, "I'm clerk of the board, and you can't hold a legal meeting nor pay a salary without me. What's the reason you don't want me to see her?" Judge Garvey unfolded his arms, fell back a step, and dropped easily into the sonorous declamation that made the stalwart Judge no inconspicuous figure on the floor of the Legislature. The newspapers, of course, were responsible for his language--as for the rest of his education; but such as it was, he used it fluently, and the declamatory manner was, to his constituency, quite an essential of eloquence--the prime difference, in fact, between oratory and plain talking.