ugh her
wedding veil before they went down to the motor which was to carry them
to Grace Church--for in a world where all else had reeled on its
foundations the "Grace Church wedding" remained an unchanged
institution.

It was in the library that he and May had always discussed the future
of the children: the studies of Dallas and his young brother Bill,
Mary's incurable indifference to "accomplishments," and passion for
sport and philanthropy, and the vague leanings toward "art" which had
finally landed the restless and curious Dallas in the office of a
rising New York architect.

The young men nowadays were emancipating themselves from the law and
business and taking up all sorts of new things. If they were not
absorbed in state politics or municipal reform, the chances were that
they were going in for Central American archaeology, for architecture
or landscape-engineering; taking a keen and learned interest in the
prerevolutionary buildings of their own country, studying and adapting
Georgian types, and protesting at the meaningless use of the word
"Colonial." Nobody nowadays had "Colonial" houses except the
millionaire grocers of the suburbs.

But above all--sometimes Archer put it above all--it was in that
library that the Governor of New York, coming down from Albany one
evening to dine and spend the night, had turned to his host, and said,
banging his clenched fist on the table and gnashing his eye-glasses:
"Hang the professional politician! You're the kind of man the country
wants, Archer. If the stable's ever to be cleaned out, men like you
have got to lend a hand in the cleaning."

"Men like you--" how Archer had glowed at the phrase! How eagerly he
had risen up at the call! It was an echo of Ned Winsett's old appeal
to roll his sleeves up and get down into the muck; but spoken by a man
who set the example of the gesture, and whose summons to follow him was
irresistible.

Archer, as he looked back, was not sure that men like himself WERE what
his country needed, at least in the active service to which Theodore
Roosevelt had pointed; in fact, there was reason to think it did not,
for after a year in the State Assembly he had not been re-elected, and
had dropped back thankfully into obscure if useful municipal work, and
from that again to the writing of occasional articles in one of the
reforming weeklies that were trying to shake the country out of its
apathy. It was little enough to look back on;