Page:Despotism and democracy; a study in Washington society and politics (IA despotismdemocra00seawiala).pdf/150

 *Eleanor led the way to the library, where her father sat.

It was a great, high-ceiled, cool room, dark, in spite of many windows and a glass door opening on a balcony. At a library table near the glass door sat Mr. James Brentwood Baldwin, alias Jim Baldwin, and on the balcony outside, under the awning, sat Mrs. James Baldwin, née Hogan.

It was easy to see whence Eleanor Baldwin had got her beauty. Jim Baldwin was handsome, Nora Hogan Baldwin was handsomer.

From the days when Jim Baldwin had carried home parcels of tea and buckets of butter in his father-in-law's corner grocery, he had cherished an honourable ambition to have a great big library full of books. In the course of time, through the operations of the shoe-stitching machine, he had been able to gratify this ambition and taste. He had all of those books which Charles Lamb declares "are no books—that is, all the books which no gentleman's library should be without." They were all bound sumptuously in calf, and éditions de luxe were as common as flies in a baker's shop. The four vast walls were lined with these treasures, and from