likes a good
fight--always did."

"Would he, do you think? Under a woman-mayor?" she added.

"I think so. It's different now you are elected, you know. Ever notice
how much easier it is to support an innovation after it is well started
than before?"

"Then come, Minnie," she said, turning to the stenographer. "Take this
to Mr. Thalberg;" and she proceeded to dictate a letter advising him
that his resignation, taking effect immediately, would be acceptable to
the mayor.

Then she dictated another as follows:

Mr. John Allingham,
Municipal League Rooms; City.

Dear Mr. Allingham:

Will you do me the favor to call at this office Thursday, the
seventeenth, at ten a. m., and oblige,

Gertrude Van Deusen,
Mayor of Roma.

Which, when Allingham opened and read it late that afternoon, caused him
to give vent to a long, low whistle, and to read it over the second
time.

But he wrote, immediately, accepting the appointment; and a dozen times
that night he asked himself what she could want of him--and just how
much he would be willing to help the woman-mayor.

Then, looking out across the moonlit city from his tower window, he
recalled that other night when they rode together in the open country
beneath the shining moon--when she was not the candidate, the
mayor-elect, the modern strenuous woman--but just a sweet and gracious
spirit with a melodious voice and a presence that thrilled him. Then he
told himself, "Yes, anything--anything she wants."

And Gertrude, in the silence of her own room, was saying to herself,
"Will he come, I wonder? Would I, if I were in his place? If I were a
man who had been brought up to believe as he does about women; and then
a modern suffragist who had won out over me, had sent for me,--to ask me
to come and help--would I go? Oh, how do I know?"

CHAPTER XIII

An Important Appointment

When John Allingham arrived at City Hall Thursday morning he was first
of all impressed with the changed interior of the place,--the absence of
loafers, the clean corridors, the blossoming plants. Neither could he
help seeing that in place of the old spirit of listlessness in the
various departments, everyone seemed busy and interested. "If this is
what women can do in politics," he began to say to himself,--but the
idea of incongruity was so deeply fixed in his mind that he at once
supp