ways frowned on these public exhibitions of the intimacy of judges in
practical politics; but Goodrich had many small vanities--he liked his
judges to hold his coat and his governors to carry his satchel. One
would say that such petty weaknesses would be the undoing of a man.
Fortunately, we are not as weak as our weakness but as strong as our
strength; and while the universal weaknesses are shared by the strong,
their strength is peculiar and rare. After Dufour had introduced himself
and we had exchanged commonplaces he said: "Senator, there's a little
conference of some of the leaders at headquarters and it isn't complete
without you. So, Senator Goodrich has sent me over to escort you."

"Thank you--very courteous of you and of him," said I without
hesitation, for I knew what was coming as soon as his name had been
brought in, and my course was laid out. "But I can't leave just now.
Please ask him if he won't come over--any time within the next four
hours." This blandly and without a sign that I was conscious of Dufour's
stupefaction--for his vanity made him believe that the god the great
Dufour knelt to must be the god of gods.

There is no more important branch of the art of successful dealing with
men than the etiquette of who shall call upon whom. Many a man has in
his very hour of triumph ruined his cause with a blunder there--by going
to see some one whom he should have compelled to come to him, or by
compelling some one to come to him when he should have made the
concession of going. I had two reasons for thus humiliating Goodrich,
neither of them the reason he doubtless attributed to me, the desire to
feed my vanity. My first reason was his temperament; I knew his having
to come to me would make him bow before me in spirit, as he was a
tyrant, and tyrants are always cringers. My second reason was that I
thought myself near enough to control of the convention to be able to
win control by creating the atmosphere of impending success. There is
always a lot of fellows who wait to see who is likely to win, so that
they may be on the side of the man in the plum tree; often there are
enough of these to gain the victory for him who can lure them over at
just the right moment.

As soon as Dufour had taken his huge body away I said to Woodruff: "Go
out with your men and gather in the office down stairs as many members
of the doubtful delegations as you can. Keep them where they'll be bound
to see Goodrich come in and