Around the coach had already gathered several small boys, huddled together, and transfixed with awe too deep for impudence.
Carroll, having greeted the men, said good-morning urbanely to the barber, who had ceased lathering Tappan and was looking at him indeterminately.

It seemed dreadful to him that this great man should have to wait for the milkman.

The barber was a conservative to the core, and would speak of the laboring-classes and tradesmen as if he himself were on the other side of the highway from birth.

Tappan himself, who, as said before, was naturally surly, was also a dissenter on principle, and had an enlarged sense of injury, had qualms at keeping waiting a man who patronized him to the extent of two quarts of cream and three quarts of milk daily.

It was like quarrelling with his bread-and-butter, as he put it, when alluding to the affair later on.
"I ain't goin' through the world seein' no men as is better 'n I be," he said, "but there's jest this much about it, I ain't a fool, an' I know enough to open the door when a man wants to walk through to pay me some money.