第79章 Again the Replacers(5)

Yes,Kitty did her best to cover it up;Kitty,as she would undoubtedly have said herself,could see a few things.But nobody could cover it up,though Beverly was now vigilant in his efforts to do so.Indeed,Replacers cannot be covered up by human agency;they bulge,they loom,they stare,they dominate the road of life,even as their automobiles drive horses and pedestrians to the wall.Bohm,roused from his financial torpor by Kitty's sharp command,did actually turn his eyes upon the church,which he had now been inside for some twenty minutes without noticing.Instinct and long training had given his eye,when it really looked at anything,a particular glance--the glance of the Replacer--which plainly calculated:"Can this be made worth money to me?"and which died instantly to a glaze of indifference on seeing that no money could be made.Bohm's eye,accordingly,waked and then glazed.Manners,courtesy,he did not need,not yet;he had looked at them with his Replacer glance,and,seeing no money in them,had gone on looking at railroads,and mines,and mills,--and bare shoulders,and bottles.Should manners and courtesy come,some day,to mean money to him,then he could have them,in his fashion,so that his admirers and his apologists should alike declare of him,"A rough diamond,but consider what he has made of himself!""After what,did you say?"This was the voice of Gazza,addressing Mrs.

Weguelin St.Michael.It must be said of Gazza that he,too,made a certain presence of interest in the traditions of Kings Port.

"After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes,"replied Mrs.Weguelin.

"Built it in Savannah,"Charley was saying to Bohm,"or Norfolk.This is a good place to bury people in,but not money.Now the phosphate proposition--"Again I dragged my attention by force away from that quiet,relentless monologue,and listened as well as I could to Mrs.Weguelin.There had come to be among us all,I think--Beverly,Kitty,Gazza,and myself--a joint impulse to shield her,to cluster about her,to follow her steps from each little lecture that she finished to the new point where the next lecture began;and we did it,performed our pilgrimage to the end;but there was less and less nature in our performance.I knew (and it was like a dream which I could not stop)that we pressed a little too close,that our questions were a little too eager,that we overprinted our faces with attention;knowing this did not help,nothing helped,and we went on to the end,seeing ourselves doing it;and it must have been that Mrs.