"Picturesque as usual," applauded the delinquent, unruffled; but he
added, more seriously: "It's natural that you should feel strongly
after your newspaper war on Shelby. Is he so sure of the nomination?"

"If he's not sure, there's no virtue in packed caucuses."

"There, that interests me," cried Graves, brightening. "I'd like to
see a caucus packed. The slang attracts me somehow. Is it very
shocking?"

Sprague laughed in spite of himself.

"In things political your artlessness is prehistoric," he said. "You
belong in the Stone Age. All in all, you and Ross Shelby aren't far
removed: he's politically immoral; you are politically unmoral."

"We'll go and talk to Ruth Temple," decided the younger man, his eye
lighting on the central figure of a group, chiefly masculine. "Who can
look at her and maintain that the higher education of women is a mere
factory for frumps?"

"Ruth has a quaint rareness all her own," Sprague answered, watching
the play of the girl's mobile face. "She had it as a mere tot. Is it
her mouth, her simple dress, her hair?--One can't say precisely what."

"Don't try. You're squinting at her like an entomologist over a
favorite beetle. Take her for what she seems, and chuck analysis. She
is decorative. She satisfies the optic nerve."

"Which is intimately allied with other nerves, my bachelor." He
counted the men around the sofa where the girl sat beside little
Milicent Hilliard, and announced, "Seven; it's Queen Ruth always."

"And, like a true monarch, bored to extinction by her courtiers.
Behold Dr. Crandall browbeating the Rev. Mr. Hewett like a hanging
judge. I'll warrant they're talking politics too. The atmosphere is
drenched with it."

Sprague bent his head to listen.

"Wrong," he chuckled slyly. "It's literature this time, or what passes
as such. They're threshing out the immortal ode on the 'Victory of
Samothrace.'"

Bernard Graves laughed, also, at some jest well understood, and moved
to watch this eddy in the astonishingly widespread discussion of an
anonymous poem, of a certain rhetorical vigor, which had been
Interpreted by some critics as a plea for woman suffrage. At this
juncture Mrs. Hilliard suddenly bore down upon them, flourishing a
yellow paper.

"Such news, such news!" she called. "Here's a telegram--a telegram
from our candidate. He is nominated! Mr. Shelby is nominated. Think
of it! One of our members! And he has wired the good news t