The Henchman | Page 4

The topic apparently knew no bottom for Mrs. Hilliard.
"How he will shine in Congress!" she went on. "Of course he'll get the
nomination?" She referred the query to Sprague.
"Probably." His reply was lukewarm.
"And isn't there news of the convention? You ought to know, who get
straight from the wires what ordinary mortals must wait to read. 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