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Tommy And Thomas
by
“We like the West, but I have liked it for ten years; this is not my first visit,” said Mrs. Carriswood.
“I have reason to be glad for that, madam. I never made another speech so good.”
He had remembered her; she laughed. “I had thought that you would forget.”
“How could I, when you have not changed at all?”
“But you have,” says Mrs. Carriswood, hardly knowing whether to show the young man his place or not.
“Yes, ma’am, naturally. But I have not learned how to make a speech yet.”
“Ah, but you make very good ones, Harry tells me.”
“Much obliged, Harry. No, ma’am, Harry is a nice boy; but he doesn’t know. I know there is a lot to learn, and I guess a lot to unlearn; and I feel all outside; I don’t even know how to get at it. I have wished a thousand times that I could talk with the lady who taught me to speak in the first place.” He walked on by her side, talking eagerly. “You don’t know how many times I have felt I would give most anything for the opportunity of just seeing you and talking with you; those things you said to me I always remembered.” He had a hundred questions evidently stinging his tongue. And some of them seemed to Mrs. Carriswood very apposite.
“I’m on the outside of such a lot of things,” says he. “When I first began to suspect that I was on the outside was when I went to the High School, and sometimes I was invited to Harry’s; that was my first acquaintance with cultivated society. You can’t learn manners from books, ma’am. I learned them at Harry’s. That is,”–he colored and laughed,–“I learned SOME. There’s plenty left, I know. Then, I went to the University. Some of the boys came from homes like Harry’s, and some of the professors there used to ask us to their houses; and I saw engravings and oil paintings, and heard the conversation of persons of culture. All this only makes me know enough to KNOW I am outside. I can see the same thing with the lawyers, too. There is a set of them that are after another kind of things; that think themselves above me and my sort of fellows. You know all the talk about this being a free and equal country. That’s the tallest kind of humbug, madam! It is that. There are sets, one above another, everywhere; big bugs and little bugs, if you will excuse the expression. And you can’t influence the big ones without knowing how they feel. A fellow can’t be poking in the dark in a speech or anywhere else. Now, these fellows here, they go into politics, sometimes; and there, I tell you, we come the nearest to a fair field and no favor! It is the best fellow gets the prize there–the sharpest-witted, the nerviest, and stanchest. Oh, talk of machine politics! all the soft chaps who ain’t willing to get up early in the morning, or to go out in the wet, THEY howl about the primaries and corruption; let them get up and clean the primaries instead of holding their noses! Those fellows, I’m not nice enough for them, but I can beat them every time. They make a monstrous racket in the newspapers, but when election comes on they can’t touch side, edge, or bottom!”
Discoursing in this fashion, with digressions to Harry in regard to the machines, the furniture, and the sales, that showed Mrs. Carriswood that he meant to keep an eye on his twenty odd thousand dollars, he strolled at her side. To Miss Van Harlem he scarcely said three words. In fact, he said exactly three words, uttered as Miss Margaret’s silken skirts swung too near a pot of varnish. They were “Look out, miss!” and at the same second, Tommy (who was in advance, with really no call to know of the danger), turned on his heel and whisked the skirts away, turning back to pick up the sentence he had dropped.