urselves,
again because we must give the other person a chance to play the
hypocrite before himself--and us. And often I left him reluctant and
trying to muster courage to refuse or finesse to evade, only to find
him the next day consenting, perhaps enthusiastic. Many's the time she
spared me the disagreeable necessity of being peremptory--doubly
disagreeable because show of authority has ever been distasteful to me
and because an order can never be so heartily executed as is an
assimilated suggestion.

When I went to him a month after her death, I expected he would still be
crushed as he was at the funeral. I listened with a feeling of revulsion
to his stilted and, as it seemed to me, perfunctory platitudes on his
"irreparable loss"--stale rhetoric about _her_, and to her most intimate
friend and his! I had thought he would be imagining himself done with
ambition for ever; I had feared his strongly religious nature would lead
him to see a "judgment" upon him and her for having exaggerated her
indisposition to gain a political point. And I had mapped out what I
would say to induce him to go on. Instead, after a few of those
stereotyped mortuary sentences, he shifted to politics and was presently
showing me that her death had hardly interrupted his plannings for the
presidential nomination. As for the "judgment," I had forgotten that in
his religion his deity was always on his side, and his misfortunes were
always of the evil one. These deities of men of action! Man with his god
a ventriloquist puppet in his pocket, and with his conscience an old dog
Tray at his heels, needing no leading string!

However, it gave me a shock, this vivid reminder from Burbank of the
slavery of ambition--ambition, the vice of vices. For it takes its
victims' all--moral, mental, physical. And, while other vices rarely
wreck any but small men or injure more than what is within their small
circles of influence, ambition seizes only the superior and sets them on
to use their superior powers to blast communities, states, nations,
continents. Yet it is called a virtue. And men who have sold themselves
to it and for it to the last shred of manhood are esteemed and, mystery
of mysteries, esteem themselves!

I had come to Burbank to manufacture him into a President. His wife and
I had together produced an excellent raw material. Now, to make it up
into the finished product!

He pointed to the filing-cases that covered the west wall of his librar