"Come on," she
said. "Sade says she don't want to hang around here any longer. It's
awful tiresome. Let's go."
He consented, placidly. The oration meant nothing to him and stirred no
one in the audience. The orator was impassioned; he shouted himself into
coughing fits, gesticulated, grew purple; he was so hot that his
collar caved in and finally swooned upon his neck in soggy exhaustion,
prostrate round his thunderings. Meanwhile, the people listened with an
air of patience, yawning here and there, and gradually growing fewer. It
was the old, old usual thing, made up of phrases that Ramsey had heard
dinning away on a thousand such occasions, and other kinds of occasions,
until they meant to him no more than so much sound. He was bored, and
glad to leave.
"Kind o' funny," he said, as they sagged along the street at their usual
tortoise gait.
"What is it, Ramsey?"
"Seems kind o' funny they never have anything to say any one can
take any interest in. Always the same ole whoopety-whoop about George
Washington and Pilgrim Fathers and so on.
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