here was nothing definite when I left the office. They hadn't begun
to ballot."

Mrs. Hilliard sensed an increasing dryness in the editor's manner.

"We're not talking literature, are we?" she laughed.

Bernard Graves considered the moment ripe for a paradox.

"The by-laws of the ideal literary club would forbid all literary
talk," he declared. "Then there would be nothing else."

"Cynic," rebuked the lady, threatening punishment with her fan. "We
shall talk politics if we choose."

Disseminating culture and an odor of patchouli she drifted down the
drawing-room to join another group, and the two men caught a fragment
of feminine comment from a divan hard by.

"Cora Hilliard is handsome," asserted a voice. "Look at those
shoulders."

"She manoeuvres to show them. Besides, she's too stout."

"What can you expect, my dear, after thirty-three years of idleness?"

"She's thirty-six," came the scrupulous correction.

"You don't mean it? And a blonde!"

"Oh, I know it's so. We were classmates in the seminary. Besides, her
Milicent is a year and two months older than my Georgie, who will be
thirteen in October, and when Milicent was born her mother was
twenty-two."

"She says she feels twenty-two now."

"Well, she looks--" the gossip languished to an indistinct murmur.

"More literary discussion," said Sprague.

"It's as literary as politics."

"You're capable of saying it's as interesting."

"Why not? It's very human."

"So is politics."

"We are drifting on the rocks of an argument. You and I can't agree
about politics, and we'd better stop trying. What absorbs you bores
me--this tiresome Shelby above all."

"Oh, surely you're not serious," protested Sprague, eagerly. "It isn't
possible that you care nothing whether Shelby or the honest man he's
scheming to supplant represents you in Washington."

"He attracts me neither as a man nor as a problem in ethics. But don't
be harsh with me. The fault is congenital, I'm sure. Every masculine
American is supposed to be interested in politics,--I wonder if the
Irish invented the notion,--but I can't conform; I don't know why."

"Gad," fumed the editor. "Your indifference is criminal."

"I like to hear you say 'gad,'" Graves observed. "You remind me of
Major Pendennis."

Sprague shrugged his thin shoulders impatiently.

"I tell you it's a crime for you to sit by as unconcerned as a mud idol
while other men struggle for civic decency."