However, there's no need to borrow trouble over
this thing. People will laugh a little, say it was a good speech,
wherever I got it, and vote the straight party ticket despite Bernard
Graves."

"Graves," said Bowers. "What has he to do with it?"

"Everything; he's the little joker with the memory."

Bowers whistled.

"What is he after?"

Shelby jerked his head toward the Temple doorstep where Bernard still
lingered.

"After her."

CHAPTER VII

"Humor a silk stocking according to his crotchet, that's my maxim,"
submitted Bowers as they threshed the matter out in its latest aspect.

"I can't see its application to Graves. He's outside politics; hates
the very name, they say."

"Practical politics is applied human nature. If a rule is sound in
politics, it will work anywhere this side of the pearly gates. Graves
may not care a tinker's dam for politics, but evidently he does get
queasy when another man's ideas are misappropriated. Perhaps that's
his crotchet. Writes himself, doesn't he?"

"Some rubbish or other," returned Shelby, contemptuously.

"That's where he is susceptible, to my thinking. I don't cotton to
your woman theory. I say leave women out of politics. So conciliate
him; humor his crotchet."

"I can't see why I should kotow to him, or what further harm he can
do," said the candidate, but he deferred to Bowers's judgment. "I'll
look him up this afternoon," he agreed; "though I've no stomach for the
job. I never liked the cuss."

He abundantly appreciated this long-standing antipathy as he cast about
for some common ground of interest in the little reception-room of the
house shared by Bernard Graves and his mother. It seemed to the
waiting caller a drab and lifeless home, uninteresting in its
appointments, and out of keeping with the wealth known to have been
inherited by the widow and her son. The young man's study was visible
down the vista of a series of low-ceiled apartments, and Shelby saw
that it was crammed with books. None of the many pictures could cope
in dash and color with his own collection and, what seemed to him
singular in a Protestant home, they were chiefly of the Madonna; all in
all, a tame assortment beside his copy of the secular masterpiece in
the great metropolitan hotel. Over one of the crowded bookcases was
the cast of a winged woman. It was armless and headless, and Shelby
wondered by what accident it had become so damaged, and why it was not