himself. As
the campaign opened, as the city was swept with the excitement of it,
with meetings at noon-day and at night, office-seekers flying about in
automobiles, walls covered with pictures of candidates, hand-bills
scattered in the streets to swirl in the wild March winds, and men
quarreling over whether Clayton or Ellsworth should be mayor, Kittrell
had to draw a political cartoon each day; and as he struggled with his
work, less and less the old joy came to cheer and spur him on. To read
the ridicule, the abuse, which the _Telegraph_ heaped on Clayton, the
distortion of facts concerning his candidature, the unfair reports of
his meetings, sickened him, and more than all, he was filled with
disgust as he tried to match in caricature these libels of the man he so
loved and honored. It was bad enough to have to flatter Clayton's
opponent, to picture him as a noble, disinterested character, ready to
sacrifice himself for the public weal. Into his pictures of this man,
attired in the long black coat of conventional respectability, with the
smug face of pharisaism, he could get nothing but cant and hypocrisy;
but in his caricatures of Clayton there was that which pained him
worse--disloyalty, untruth, and now and then, to the discerning few who
knew the tragedy of Kittrell's soul, there was pity. And thus his work
declined in value; lacking all sincerity, all faith in itself or its
purpose, it became false, uncertain, full of jarring notes, and, in
short, never once rang true. As for Edith, she never discussed his work
now; she spoke of the campaign little, and yet he knew she was deeply
concerned, and she grew hot with resentment at the methods of the
_Telegraph_. Her only consolation was derived from the _Post_, which of
course, supported Clayton; and the final drop of bitterness in
Kittrell's cup came one evening when he realized that she was following
with sympathetic interest the cartoons in that paper.

For the _Post_ had a new cartoonist, Banks, a boy whom Hardy had picked
up somewhere and was training to the work Kittrell had laid down. To
Kittrell there was a cruel fascination in the progress Banks was making;
he watched it with a critical, professional eye, at first with
amusement, then with surprise, and now at last, in the discovery of
Edith's interest, with a keen jealousy of which he was ashamed. The boy
was crude and untrained; his work was not to be compared with
Kittrell's, master of line that he was,