It was Dr.
Bowdler, rector of an Episcopal church, a man of more influence out of
the Church than any in it. He was in the breakfast-room now, trimming
the hanging-baskets in the window, while his niece finished her coffee:
he "usually saved his appetite for dinner, English fashion; cigars until
then,"--poohing at all preaching of hygiene, as usual, as "stuff."
There were several other gentlemen in the room,--waiting, apparently,
for something,--reading the morning papers, playing with the
Newfoundland dog that had curled himself up in the patch of sunshine by
the window, or chatting with Miss Defourchet. None of them, she saw,
were men of cultured leisure: one or two millionnaires, burly,
stubby-nosed fellows, with practised eyes and Port-hinting faces: the
class of men whose money was made thirty years back, who wear slouched
clothes, and wield the coarser power in the States. They came out to the
talk fit for a lady, on the open general field, in a lumbering, soggy
way, the bank-note smell on every thought. The others, more unused to
society, caught its habit better, she thought, belonging as they did to
a higher order: they were practical mechanicians, and their profession
called, she knew, for tolerably powerful and facile faculties of brain.
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