The 13th District: A Story of a CandidateWhitlock, Brand
General
The 13th District: A Story of a Candidate
Whitlock, Brand
Didactic fiction; Elections -- Fiction; Political campaigns -- Fiction; Political fiction; Social problems -- Fiction
She stopped; and so did he. They had sounded that note several times
of late. The truth was, that the presence of Garwood in the house
was already beginning to have its effect on his father-in-law. When
Garwood was in Washington Harkness felt a pride in him, but after he
had been at home for awhile, his various characteristics one after
another got on the old man's nerves, until he could scarcely treat
him civilly. He detested Garwood's lazy habits, his lying abed in the
mornings, his afternoon naps, though Harkness took naps himself, and
he distrusted his long absences at night. More than all he inwardly
raged at Garwood's extravagance, though he dared not complain of it,
for Emily had been firm in her insistence that they pay for their
board, knowing, as she did, her father's punctiliousness in matters of
money, a disposition likely to be cultivated by those who have money
enough to gratify it. Harkness would doubtless have preferred that the
Garwoods keep house, as Jerome was always threatening to do, but he
could not bear the thought of the loneliness Emily's absence would add
to his idleness. Restrained therefore from complaining of Garwood, his
discontent expressed itself in complaints of himself, and he shuffled
about the house with a martyr's patient suffering written in his face,
lowering himself carefully into his chair whenever he sat down, with a
prolonged, senile "Ah-h-h-h" that heralded, as he meant it to do, the
encroachments of age.
And then the baby worried him. They had given the boy his name, Ethan,
but they prefixed it with the other name of John, which had belonged
to Garwood's father. Garwood had mildly protested against the name
of Ethan because he didn't care for biblical names, though Emily had
insisted that Ethan was not a biblical name. The argument had been
settled, at least to Garwood's satisfaction, for he claimed to have
found the name in the Old Testament, but with a firmness for which
Emily said the name itself stood, she insisted that the mere mention of
it in Holy Writ did not constitute it a biblical name. But though young
John Ethan kept his grandfather's name he never found a way to his
grandfather's graces, at least he had not done so yet, and this only
added another complication to the many in which Emily found her life
enmeshed.
And so this evening Harkness took refuge in his senility and his
troubles.
"Well," he ventured with a sigh that he knew was pathetic, "if I could
only afford it I'd take you and the boy away for the summer, but I'm
poor now and old."
"I couldn't leave Jerome just now, father, but this talk about your
being poor and old is absurd, absurd--and I want you to quit it. Why
don't you go away this summer? Go back to New Hampshire for a rest. It
would do you a world of good, and you've always said you were going as
soon as you could get away from the bank."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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