He rose and stood smiling into her flushed face as she gasped:
"They say the South has never lacked audacity, Miss Barton. I'm wondering if they are really going to make good such words with deeds."
He spoke with a cold detachment that chilled and angered the impulsive girl. A hot answer was on her lips when she remembered suddenly that he was a foreigner.
"Of course, Signor, you can not understand our feelings!"
"On the other hand, I assure you, I do--I'm just wondering in a cold intellectual way whether the oratorical temperament--the temperament of passion, of righteous wrath of the explosive type which we have just witnessed, will win in the trial by fire which war will bring--"
"You doubt our courage?" she interrupted, with a slight curve of the proud little lips.
"Far from it--I assure you! I'm only wondering if it has the sullen, dogged, staying qualities these stolid Northern men down there have exhibited while they listened--"
The girl threw him a quick surprised look and he stopped. His voice had unconsciously taken the tones of a soliloquy.
"I beg your pardon, Miss Barton," he said, with sudden swing to the polite tones of society. "I'm annoying you with my foreign speculations--"
A sudden murmur swept the galleries and all eyes were turned on the tall slender figure of Jefferson Davis as he slowly entered the Senate Chamber.
"I have never seen him before. He has been quite ill I hear."
"Yes. He's been in bed for the past week suffering agonies from neuralgia. He lost the sight of one of his eyes from chronic pain caused by exposure in the service of his country in the northwest."
"He was compelled to remain in a darkened room for months the past year to save the sight of his remaining eye."
"That accounts for my not having seen him before."
Socola followed the straight military figure with painful interest as he slowly moved toward his seat greeting with evident weakness his colleagues as he passed. He was astonished beyond measure at the personality of the famous leader of the "Southern Conspirators" of whom he had heard so much. He was the last man in all the crowd he would have singled out for such a rôle. The face was too refined, too spiritual, too purely intellectual for the man of revolution. His high forehead, straight nose, thin compressed lips and pointed chin belonged to the poet and dreamer rather than the man of action. The hollow cheek bones and deeply furrowed mouth told of suffering so acute the sympathy of every observer was instantly won.