He was really a fine looking man, was Garwood, as he threw his shoulders back, and gave his head that old determined toss, finer looking then as a congressman than he had been as a mere candidate for Congress a year and a half before. Perhaps it was because he had grown stouter, perhaps it was the finer manner of a man of the world he had learned in Washington, perhaps it was his well-groomed appearance, for his long black coat had a gloss of richness rather than the shine of poverty, his trousers were creased and fitted neatly over his low shoes, his white waistcoat curved gracefully over the paunch of prosperousness, his shirt, as a student of clothes might have noticed, was made with the collar and cuffs attached--the easy way to be marked for a gentleman--while the wide Panama hat he wore had the distinguishing effect of having been bought somewhere else. But more than all, it was the atmosphere of official position which enveloped him--and of which he was thoroughly conscious--that spread a spell over the observer. No one would ever call him Jerry now, or ever again, unless, perhaps, in the heat of his campaign for reëlection. Of his face, it may be said that it was fuller and redder; the mouth, clean shaven, had taken on new lines, but they were hardly as pleasing as the old ones had been in the days before.
And so he made his dignified progress up to the court house. He had intended, on coming down, to go to his office where young Enright, lately admitted, was holding forth with a bright new sign under Garwood's old one, but it occurred to him that it would benefit him to reassert his relation to the bar of Polk County by appearing in court on term day, and sitting or standing about. Perhaps Judge Bickerstaff would invite him to sit beside him on the bench. He remembered that that was what the judge used to do whenever General Bancroft came home from Washington.
He had been bowing to acquaintances all the way down town with his old amiable smile, seeking to disarm it of a new quality of reservation that had lately entered into it, but now, in the cool dark tunnels they called corridors, he met men face to face, and all the way along, and even up the steep and winding stairs that curved after a colonial pattern to the upper story, he must pause to take their hands, and carefully, and distinctly, according to the training he had given his memory in this respect, call them by name; more often than not by their given names. When he left them, they felt a glow of pleasure, though they were all the while conscious that something was lacking in this apparent heartiness.