The Henchman | Page 4

Has he won?"
"There was nothing definite when I left the office. They hadn't begun to ballot."
Mrs. Hilliard sensed an increasing dryness in the editor's manner.
"We're not talking literature, are we?" she laughed.
Bernard Graves considered the moment ripe for a paradox.
"The by-laws of the ideal literary club would forbid all literary talk," he declared. "Then there would be nothing else."
"Cynic," rebuked the lady, threatening punishment with her fan. "We shall talk politics if we choose."
Disseminating culture and an odor of patchouli she drifted down the drawing-room to join another group, and the two men caught a fragment of feminine comment from a divan hard by.
"Cora Hilliard is handsome," asserted a voice. "Look at those shoulders."
"She manoeuvres to show them. Besides, she's too stout."
"What can you expect, my dear, after thirty-three years of idleness?"
"She's thirty-six," came the scrupulous correction.
"You don't mean it? And a blonde!"
"Oh, I know it's so. We were classmates in the seminary. Besides, her Milicent is a year and two months older than my Georgie, who will be thirteen in October, and when Milicent was born her mother was twenty-two."
"She says she feels twenty-two now."
"Well, she looks--" the gossip languished to an indistinct murmur.
"More literary discussion," said Sprague.
"It's as literary as politics."
"You're capable of saying it's as interesting."
"Why not? It's very human."
"So is politics."
"We are drifting on the rocks of an argument. You and I can't agree about politics, and we'd better stop trying. What absorbs you bores me--this tiresome Shelby above all."
"Oh, surely you're not serious," protested Sprague, eagerly. "It isn't possible that you care nothing whether Shelby or the honest man he's scheming to supplant represents you in Washington."
"He attracts me neither as a man nor as a problem in ethics. But don't be harsh with me. The fault is congenital, I'm sure. Every masculine American is supposed to be interested in politics,--I wonder if the Irish invented the notion,--but I can't conform; I don't know why."
"Gad," fumed the editor. "Your indifference is criminal."
"I like to hear you say 'gad,'" Graves observed. "You remind me of Major Pendennis."
Sprague shrugged his thin shoulders impatiently.
"I tell you it's a crime for you to sit by as unconcerned as a mud idol while other men struggle for civic decency."
"Picturesque as usual," applauded the delinquent, unruffled; but he added, more seriously: "It's natural that you should feel strongly after your newspaper war on Shelby. Is he so sure of the nomination?"
"If he's not sure, there's no virtue in packed caucuses."
"There, that interests me," cried Graves, brightening. "I'd like to see a caucus packed. The slang attracts me somehow. Is it very shocking?"
Sprague laughed in spite of himself.
"In things political your artlessness is prehistoric," he said. "You belong in the Stone Age. All in all, you and Ross Shelby aren't far removed: he's politically immoral; you are politically unmoral."
"We'll go and talk to Ruth Temple," decided the younger man, his eye lighting on the central figure of a group, chiefly masculine. "Who can look at her and maintain that the higher education of women is a mere factory for frumps?"
"Ruth has a quaint rareness all her own," Sprague answered, watching the play of the girl's mobile face. "She had it as a mere tot. Is it her mouth, her simple dress, her hair?--One can't say precisely what."
"Don't try. You're squinting at her like an entomologist over a favorite beetle. Take her for what she seems, and chuck analysis. She is decorative. She satisfies the optic nerve."
"Which is intimately allied with other nerves, my bachelor." He counted the men around the sofa where the girl sat beside little Milicent Hilliard, and announced, "Seven; it's Queen Ruth always."
"And, like a true monarch, bored to extinction by her courtiers. Behold Dr. Crandall browbeating the Rev. Mr. Hewett like a hanging judge. I'll warrant they're talking politics too. The atmosphere is drenched with it."
Sprague bent his head to listen.
"Wrong," he chuckled slyly. "It's literature this time, or what passes as such. They're threshing out the immortal ode on the 'Victory of Samothrace.'"
Bernard Graves laughed, also, at some jest well understood, and moved to watch this eddy in the astonishingly widespread discussion of an anonymous poem, of a certain rhetorical vigor, which had been Interpreted by some critics as a plea for woman suffrage. At this juncture Mrs. Hilliard suddenly bore down upon them, flourishing a yellow paper.
"Such news, such news!" she called. "Here's a telegram--a telegram from our candidate. He is nominated! Mr. Shelby is nominated. Think of it! One of our members! And he has wired the good news to us first of all!" She searched vainly for her glasses--her big blue eyes were astigmatic--and finally, with an impatient "You read it to them all," thrust the message into Volney Sprague's reluctant fingers.
He unfolded and read the paper, in lively quandary whether her choice were