ions pointing toward a United
States senatorship, the election to which would fall within the province
of the next legislature. The mine-owner himself, a pudgy little man with
a bald spot on top of his head and a corner-grocery point of view
carefully tucked away inside of it--an outlook upon life which was a
survival from his hard-working past--would willingly have dodged, but
Mrs. Weatherford was inexorable. There were two grown daughters and a
growing son, and it was for these that she was socially ambitious.

The reception for which the senator's wife and her guest had driven
thirty miles through the dust of the sage-brush hills was one of the
many moves in Mrs. Weatherford's private campaign. For the opening-gun
occasion the great house in Mesa Circle was lighted from basement to
turret--to all of the numerous turrets; an awning fringed with electric
bulbs sheltered the carpeted walk from the street to the grand entrance,
an army of lackeys paraded in the vestibule, and the wives and daughters
of the bravest and best in the capital city's political contingent stood
with Mrs. Weatherford in the long receiving-line.

From room to room in the vast house a curiously assorted throng of the
bidden ones worked its way as the jam and crush permitted. A firm
believer in the maxim that in numbers there is strength, the hostess had
made her invitation-list long and catholic. For the gossips there were
the crowded drawing-rooms, for the hungry there were Lucullian tables,
and for the sentimentalists there was the conservatory.

It was a mark of the unashamed newness of the Weatherford riches that
the conservatory, a glass-and-iron greenhouse, built out as an extension
of one of the drawing-rooms, was called "the herbarium." It was a
reproduction, on a generous scale, of a tropical garden. Half-grown
palms and banana-trees made a well-ordered jungle of the softly lighted
interior; and if, in the gathering of her floral treasures, Mrs.
Weatherford had omitted any precious bit of greenery whose cost would
have shed additional lustre upon the Weatherford resources, it was
because no one had remembered to mention the name of it to her.

Ex-Senator Blount's party of three was fashionably late at the function
in Mesa Circle, but in the crush filling the spacious drawing-rooms the
hostess and her long line of receiving assistants were still on duty.
Having successfully passed the line with her husband and Patricia,
little Mrs. Blou