"
He started to make his way through the crowd, followed by the admiring
looks of various young women who had been frankly listening to the
conversation, although they were strangers.
"Oh, isn't the statue just too lovely for anything," gushingly remarked
one of them, with startling originality; "it's so noble and--. And,
oh," she broke off suddenly, the light of a new discovery shining in
her face, "just see, girls, that's corn in her hand."
"Oh, yes, and cotton," responded her companion. "See, it really is
cotton, and something else."
"Yes, that must be maize," returned the other, oracularly; "it's all so
beautifully American."
The crowd moved and swayed and changed, until Ethel Mott stood close to
the _America_, with her back turned squarely upon the figure. She
evidently found more pleasure in looking at her companion than in
studying the work of the sculptor, which she had nominally come to see.
"I think it will be too cold, Thayer, to go out in the dog-cart," she
said, with one of those glances whose meaning not even a poet could put
into words.
"Oh, no," Kent answered. "I have a tremendously heavy rug, and you can
wrap up."
"Well," was her answer, "if it's pleasant, and the sun shines, and I
don't change my mind, and I feel like it, perhaps I'll go. At any rate
you may come round about ten o'clock."
Rangely was too far away to catch, amid the babble of the crowd, a
single word of this conversation, but he noted the looks which the pair
exchanged.
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