At any rate I came away from the meeting with a stronger personal
interest in politics than I had ever felt in my life. Instead of
seeming like an abstruse or vague issue it seemed to me pretty
concrete and pretty vital. It concerned me and my immediate neighbors.
Here was a man who was going to Congress not as a figurehead of his
party but to make laws for Rafferty and for me. He was to be my
congressman if I chose to help make him such. He knew my name, knew my
occupation, knew that I had a wife and one child, knew my address. And
I want to say that he didn't forget them either.

As I walked back through the brightly lighted streets which were still
as much alive as at high noon, I felt that after all this was my ward
and my city. I wasn't a mere dummy, I was a member of a vast
corporation. I had been to a rally and had shaken hands with Sweeney.

Ruth's only comment was a disgusted grunt as she smelled the rank
tobacco in my clothes. She kept them out on the roof all the next
day.

CHAPTER XII

OUR FIRST WINTER

This first winter was filled with just about as much interest as it
was possible for three people to crowd into six or seven months. And
even then there was so much left over which we wanted to do that we
fairly groaned as we saw opportunity after opportunity slip by which
we simply didn't have the time to improve.

To begin with the boy, he went at his studies with a zest that placed
him among the first ten of his class. Dick wasn't a quick boy at his
books and so this stood for sheer hard plugging. To me this made his
success all the more noteworthy. Furthermore it wasn't the result of
goading either from Ruth or myself. I kept after him about the details
of his school life and about the boys he met, but I let him go his own
gait in his studies. I wanted to see just how the new point of view
would work out in him. The result as I saw it was that every night
after supper he went at his problems not as a mere school boy but
man-fashion. He sailed in to learn. He had to. There was no prestige
in that school coming from what the fathers did. No one knew what the
fathers did. It didn't matter. With half a dozen nationalities in the
race the school was too cosmopolitan to admit such local issues. A few
boys might chum together feeling they were better than the others, but
the school as a whole didn't recognize them. Each boy counted for what
he did--what he was.

Of the other nine boys in the f