bers of the Culture Club to stand by their own, and
appealing to such outside its membership as seemed desirable on the
ground of local pride. Shelby became all things to all men. To the
club people he was the Club Candidate; to the unclubbed townsfolk he
was New Babylon's Candidate; while among the quarry workers and other
socially impossible flotsam and jetsam of the voting public other
agencies than Mrs. Hilliard's heralded him as the People's Candidate.
Yet the fog of apathy refused to lift.

There can naturally be little of the herdlike crushing at the doors of
a political gathering in the country which marks the urban rally. The
rural citizen has elbow-room to take his politics sedately and order
his going with temperate pulse and judicial mind. Of such mettle
normally were the New Babylonians who took their leisured way beneath
the fluted columns of the court-house into Shelby's rally; but this
audience felt itself more than normally temperate and judicial.
Despite Mrs. Hilliard, despite the Hon. Seneca Bowers, despite Shelby's
own striving, it had come less to encourage than to try and weigh.

The high places were immutably fixed. The bench of the courtroom,
surmounted by a pitcher of ice-water and adorned by crayon portraits of
New Babylonians learned in the law, of course stood consecrate to the
speakers. The arm-chairs within the railed precinct set apart for
members of the bar were by unwritten canon the peculiar haunt of
citizens of light and leading, while the jury-box and its neighboring
benches by custom immemorial bloomed with the pick of feminine good
society. It was a privilege of the socially elect to enter such
meetings at the court-house by way of the court's own staircase behind
the bench, and so came Bernard Graves. Spying a vacant seat beside
Ruth Temple, the young man slipped into it as unobtrusively as Mrs.
Hilliard's acute sense of her responsibility as society's chief whip
would permit.

"The club has responded nobly," she confided in a stage whisper across
the intervening millinery. "That eccentric Volney Sprague is
positively the only recreant. And isn't the audience representative?"

She beamed impartially round upon the just and the unjust through her
jewelled lorgnon. Mrs. Hilliard rejoiced in her lorgnon. It
compensated fully for her defect of vision, and lent her a distinction
which she felt to be wholly cosmopolitan. She aspired to be
cosmopolitan.

The New Babylon