"It's over there in the picnic grounds by the court-house," he
pursued. "Come on. We needn't dismount if you don't feel like it--but
I've a curiosity to know what he's talking about."
Her fuss, of course, he told himself, had been foolish, but after she
had made the fuss, he had no intention of returning without hearing
the miller. Abel's ambition as an orator bored him a little, for in his
class the generations ahead of him had depleted the racial supply of
political material. The nuisance of politics had been spared him, he
would have said, because the control of the State was passing from the
higher to the lower classes. To his habit of intellectual cynicism, the
miller's raw enthusiasm for what Gay called the practically untenable
and ideally heroic doctrine of equality, offered a spectacle for honest
and tolerant amusement.
"Oh, come on," he urged again after a moment, "we'll stop by the fence
under that cherry-tree and nobody will see us."
As he spoke he turned his horse toward the paling fence, while Molly
hesitated, hung back, regretted bitterly that she had come, and then
slowly followed.
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