An American Suffragette | Page 3

around his neck and pin ribbons all over his coat, but he wouldn't stand for it. He's an awfully modest fellow, and he went over to London with Hall, who swears by him; says he believes he put a new heart in him, and all that sort of thing. There comes the boat now. Better have your photographers ready, for all you'll get will be a picture of him keeping his mouth shut."
As the big English boat swung slowly into its dock, with the help of half a dozen tugs that puffed and pounded at its side, the newspaper men and Dr. Earl's family caught sight of him simultaneously, as he waved his hand and called across the intervening space with all the abandon of a returning traveler.
He could make them hear now. "Leonora, dear, how are you!" as a remarkably sweet-faced girl threw a shower of kisses in his direction, which passed on their way an equal number of his own. "And Hilda! And for the life of me, there's Frank! Love to all of you!" A few minutes more and he was with them. He caught the girl in his arms and gave her a long and tender embrace. Then he turned to the others and greeted them with all the fraternal warmth natural after eighteen months' separation.
"How splendid it is to see you all again! What brought you to New York, Frank?"
"Oh, just to see if I could cross Broadway without being bumped into by a trolley car or a taxi-cab or an airship. Incidentally, to keep you from losing your breath and hearing in the new tunnels through which you will be shot under these New York rivers."
"Tubes, you mean, brother dear, tubes. I've been doing nothing else but shoot the London tubes for the last fortnight."
"Where I live, in the wild and woolly Rockies, we call them tunnels," answered his brother. "Wouldn't the railroad builder howl at the idea of 'tubing the mountains,' and the miner would have a war-dance of delight at the suggestion that he must 'tube his claim.' These English airs are all right, Dr. John Earl, but you may as well learn to talk real American if you expect to chop bones and exploit microbes in this country," and the young man glowed his admiration while plying him with badinage.
The first greetings were scarcely over when the newspaper men made known their mission, Tourney acting as spokesman for them all. Earl shook his hand warmly.
"I'm awfully glad to see you," he said, "but you know I never give interviews. I don't know how, to begin with, and I couldn't say anything that would interest your readers. I have come back to practice my profession in New York City; that is all I can tell you."
"But that Paris case," pleaded Bedford. "Do tell us about that."
"Did you use the Hindoo method of respiration that the Swami Bramachunenda gave an exposition of here two or three years ago?" asked another of the fraternity, and the others followed with different interrogatives, but Earl laughed and waved them all away.
"I don't know what the Swami did," he said, "but if he is like some of his brothers I'm ready to believe anything. All that I did, and a great deal that I never thought of doing myself, or heard of anybody else doing on this planet, was told in your papers at the time. Really, if I had anything worth your while as a news story I would be glad to give it to you--one of these days I may have, but you must excuse me now."
His manner was courteous but unmistakable, and turning away from them he was soon absorbed in conversation with the pretty girl and his brother and sister. He hardly took his eyes off the former as he recounted his adventures abroad.
Three months previously he and Leonora Kimball had been betrothed in Vienna, and it was agreed that they were to be married soon after his arrival home. In a social way, the match met the approval of New York's select set, for they belonged to equally wealthy and prominent families. The Earls had come to New York from New England, two generations ago, and the foundation of the family fortune had been laid in a small block of New York, New Haven and Hartford stock, which had grown into a huge block of both stocks and bonds from the various expansions of stock and consolidations of property that had meanwhile taken place. The Kimballs had come from the Pacific coast, where the same alchemist's result had been wrought with a block of Southern Pacific Railway stock. The family tree of the Earls had rooted itself into the subsoil of real culture, while that of the Kimballs was mostly displayed above