d the F.M. of M. had got
his breath, and he said:

"I couldn't remember my own name before an audience, Mr. Hendricks."

"You're fluent enough in that back room of yours."

"That's different."

"The people we're going after don't want oratory. They want good,
straight talk, and a fellow behind it who doesn't believe the country's
headed straight for perdition. We've had enough calamity bowlers. You've
got the way out. The plain people. The hope of the nation. And, by God,
you love your country, and not for what you can get out of it. That's a
thing a fellow's got to have inside him. He can't pretend it and get it
over."

In the end the F.M. of M. capitulated.

It was late when Mr. Hendricks left. He went away with all the old
envelopes in his pockets covered with memoranda.

"Just wait a minute, son," he would say. "I've got to make some speeches
myself. Repeat that, now. 'Sins of omission are as great, even greater
than sins of commission. The lethargic citizen throws open the gates to
revolution.' How do you spell 'lethargic'?"

But it was not Hendricks and his campaign that kept the F.M. of M. awake
until dawn. He sat in front of his soft coal fire, and when it died
to gray-white ash he still sat there, unconscious of the chill of the
spring night. Mostly he thought of Lily, and of Louis Akers, big and
handsome, of his insolent eyes and his self-indulgent mouth. Into that
curious whirlpool that is the mind came now and then other visions: His
mother asleep in her chair; the men in the War Department who had
turned him down; a girl at home who had loved him, and made him feel
desperately unhappy because he could not love her in return. Was love
always like that? If it was what He intended, why was it so often
without reciprocation?

He took to walking about the room, according to his old habit, and
obediently Jinx followed him.

It was four by his alarm clock when Edith knocked at his door. She was
in a wrapper flung over her nightgown, and with her hair flying loose
she looked childish and very small.

"I wish you would go to bed," she said, rather petulantly. "Are you
sick, or anything?"

"I was thinking, Edith. I'm sorry. I'll go at once. Why aren't you
asleep?"

"I don't sleep much lately." Their voices were cautious. "I never go to
sleep until you're settled down, anyhow."

"Why not? Am I noisy?"

"It's not that."

She went away, a drooping, listless figure that climbed the stairs
slowly an