Page:Stanwood Pier--The ancient grudge.djvu/109

98 been a long engagement, but I objected to her getting married while Stewart was just a student at Technology. Perhaps now she'll go over next spring and be married in Paris—though of course I'd rather have her wait till Stewart is settled down in this country."

"Lydia's still at Chester?"

"Yes, she'll be home in less than a month now. I think she'll be ready to come. Now that Stewart's gone, the summer is n't quite the same for her."

He was a genial, brisk little man, very neat in his frock coat and large blue Ascot tie, with his gray mustache closely clipped and pointed, and his small blunt boots brightly polished; he carried himself with a kindly pompousness toward the young, and an aggressive dignity—demanded by his minuteness—toward men of his own age. Above his shrewd blue eyes towered the benevolent dome of his bald head, to a height of which he was secretly proud and which led him to pay clandestine visits to phrenologists; he preserved the records of these sittings, and sometimes he and Mrs. Dunbar took them out and fondly brooded over them. Had he not achieved success as a manufacturer, distinction had been his in literature; he had a master mind for statesmanship; he possessed mechanical genius which, properly developed, had been prolific in invention. "Never mind, George dear," Mrs. Dunbar had once said to him when with rueful pride he had shown her the most gratifying of all the charts; "if three great men were spoiled in making one good one, I don't begrudge them a bit." And she had bent down over the superb bald head and kissed the three cranial bumps containing the vast undeveloped possibilities, exclaiming as she did so, "There, Poet!" "There, Statesman!" "There, Inventor!" And then she kissed him on the lips, and said, "There, George!" The unfolding to himself of his many-sidedness had perhaps aided in preserving the little man's fresh springiness of step, but with his wife's help he was a sensible and modest soul