Capitolo 82
in conformity with comments without feeling them, not looking really above from
his/her desk, and appearing absorbed in jobs. This was his
protection against the curiosity and the garrulity.
The pretense of job was the curtain he drew among him and
the world.
Behind this curtain its mental operations followed, unperturbed from
what was around him, while he felt everybody that has been said, and says
few or nothing him. His/her followers respected this reserve, and
leaves him/it alone. He was their prophet, and it had an isolation right.
He was their head of a tribe, and while he sat in his monosyllabic
loneliness, its worn-out tail reclined in the various attitudes around him,
and every now and then a ray of man, or another swore. Newspapers
and tobacco both their resource in periods of absolute silence.
A shade of depression remained on the faces and the voices of Clan
Ratcliffe that evening, as it is not unusual with strengths in the eve of
battle. Their comments came to longer intervals, and it were more
blunt and casual that accustomed to. There was a lack of the elasticity in
theirs carrying and it tunes up, while coming partly from understanding with the
evident depression of their head; partly from the signs of the
time. The President was to arrive in forty-eight hours, and as
there properly was not still signal that him it appreciated their services;
there were only also signals unmistakeable that he was painfully
misguided and it deceived, that its expression was turned completely in
another direction, and that all of their sacrifices were counted as
unworthy. There was reason to believe that he came with a
deliberate purpose of making war on Ratcliffe and to break him/it
down; to refuse to give patronage on them, and to give
it wherever it would hurt more deeply them. To the thought that
their crop honestly earned of foreign missions and consulates,
department-desks, custom-house and offices of income,
postmasterships, Indian agencies and army and contracts of military harbor,
now it would be wrung from their taking from the selfish avarice of a