His dress
was in keeping with his person, and his manner quite as vulgar as
either.
He was sitting to-night in one corner of the sofa, his corpulent person
heaped up in an unshapely mass, talking with a fluency that now and
then died away entirely, while he paused to speculate what sort of a
game his hostess might be playing with Mr. Greenfield.
"The fact is," Mrs. Sampson was saying, as Snaffle recalled his
attention from one of these fits of abstraction, "that I don't know
what I shall do this summer; and I don't like to believe that summer is
so near that I must decide soon."
"You were at Ashmont last year, weren't you?" Snaffle asked. "Why don't
you go there again."
Mrs. Sampson shot him a quick glance which Snaffle understood at once
to mean that he was to second her in something she was attempting. He
did not yet get his clew clearly enough to understand just how, but the
look put him on the alert, as the hostess answered,--
"Oh, it is all spoiled. The railroad has been put through and all the
summer visitors are giving it up. I'm sure I don't know what will
become of all the poverty-stricken widows that made their living out of
taking boarders. That railroad has been an expensive job for Ashmont in
every way."
Greenfield smiled, his big, genial smile which had so much warmth in
it.
"That isn't usually the way people look at the effect of a railroad on
a town.
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