mperance platform I've been assiduously studying that literature;
and I've gathered from your own evidence--what I'd strongly suspected
before--that all your converted drunkards had a hell of a good time
before you got at 'em, and that... and that a good many of 'em have gone
on having it since..."

At this point he broke off, swept the audience with his confident smile,
and then, collapsing, tried to sit down on a chair that didn't happen to
be there, and disappeared among his agitated supporters.

There was a night-mare moment during which Undine, through the doorway,
saw Ben Frusk and the others close about the fallen orator to the crash
of crockery and tumbling chairs; then some one jumped up and shut the
parlour door, and a long-necked Sunday school teacher, who had been
nervously waiting his chance, and had almost given it up, rose from his
feet and recited High Tide at Gettysburg amid hysterical applause.

The scandal was considerable, but Moffatt, though he vanished from the
social horizon, managed to keep his place in the power-house till he
went off for a week and turned up again without being able to give a
satisfactory reason for his absence. After that he drifted from one job
to another, now extolled for his "smartness" and business capacity, now
dismissed in disgrace as an irresponsible loafer. His head was always
full of immense nebulous schemes for the enlargement and development of
any business he happened to be employed in. Sometimes his suggestions
interested his employers, but proved unpractical and inapplicable;
sometimes he wore out their patience or was thought to be a dangerous
dreamer. Whenever he found there was no hope of his ideas being adopted
he lost interest in his work, came late and left early, or disappeared
for two or three days at a time without troubling himself to account for
his absences. At last even those who had been cynical enough to smile
over his disgrace at the temperance supper began to speak of him as a
hopeless failure, and he lost the support of the feminine community when
one Sunday morning, just as the Baptist and Methodist churches were
releasing their congregations, he walked up Eubaw Avenue with a young
woman less known to those sacred edifices than to the saloons of North
Fifth Street.

Undine's estimate of people had always been based on their apparent
power of getting what they wanted--provided it came under the category
of things she understood wanting. Succe