ty."

The Hon. Maxwell paused and his two friends nodded assent after his
somewhat lengthy talk. Paul's first impulse was to get tremendously mad
and tell the visitors to get out, as politely as it could be done in a
hurry. Then his sense of humour and of right proportion came to save
him.

Maxwell he knew fairly well to be one of the most narrow minded type of
politicians, honest enough so far as that went, but without a shred of
real patriotism or any faintest glimmer of sense on matters of public
welfare. His little soul revolved in a jerky and contracted orbit about
the party. This orbit never took him out of sight of the "party." Under
good men and bad in office, under defeat and under victory, under the
varying vicissitudes of fortune that his meagre political life had known
for forty years, he had never gone back on the party. He had held one or
two minor offices in the course of his career and was deeply grateful to
the party for recognising his right to an office. But when the party
ignored him and put in some other creature, Maxwell never complained. To
change the figure from the satellite and the orbit to a living organism,
Maxwell was like Bill Syke's dog; no matter how the party treated him,
he licked its hand just the same and showed the same loyalty and
affection for the party when it kicked him down stairs as when it fed
him at the pie counter. In forty years Maxwell had not learned a new
idea or grown an inch in political stature. He was a party man and was
proud of it. His one great virtue was that he was honest. He voted
regularly for all sorts of thieves and boodlers and scoundrels nominated
by the party, but he had in some marvelous fashion known only to his
Maker, kept himself clear of all personal bribery and political
trickery.

All this Paul knew quite well, and he was not able to despise Maxwell on
account of his one redeeming factor. But the slavery that had tied
Maxwell body and soul all his life was so foreign to Paul's whole makeup
that he could not understand it and he had to repress his natural desire
to explode over Maxwell's talk. But he did manage to say quite calmly:

"Mr. Maxwell, I appreciate your plea for the party, but I don't see
things as you do. While I accepted the nomination, as you say, at the
hands of the party, I distinctly outlined my views at the time and made
no pledges that bind me either to the party or to measures, if these
measures conflict with my own sense of