t the metaphors!)--at his feet in the attitude of a humble
learner. It took some of the conceit out of me; and yet, with true
Elizabethan inconsistency I turned this new view of his character
against him, and because he--well, it doesn't matter what--I gave him a
pre-nuptial instalment of 'cruel and inhuman treatment.'

"Then he became timid and over-respectful, and not at all like himself,
and I all the time just longing to make up to him all the arrears of
kindness which were due. It seemed as if I had a new lover, one who
needed encouragement, one who made a goddess of me, in the place of the
almost too bold gallant who had been mine; and lo! when he suddenly
comes on me with all his pristine assurance and seeming contempt for
the weepful things I mentioned above, I don't like it at all. I feel
as if two men in the same mask are courting me, and I without
discernment enough to tell one from the other.

"Now, if I am so shilly-shallying as this before marriage, what shall I
be after? Can I go on with so much of doubt in my own mind?

"Oh, if I could only be sure of the Eugene I think I sometimes see,
strong to do, tender to feel, and with the uplift of insight----

"To show how thoroughly insane my state of mind is, I have only to say
to you that by the exercise of the most tremendous pressure on the part
of our very best men, Eugene, much against his will, has been put in
nomination for mayor. He will purify the civic life of our town, and,
I am assured, will, if he will enter public life to that extent, be
sent to Washington.

"I have always thought that I'd like Washington society----"

Here Elizabeth's letter came to an end. She read it over carefully,
tore it up, threw the fragments in the grate, and wrote her friend
another and maybe a wiser one. Then she wrote to Mr. Brassfield a note
which Mr. Amidon found in his room when he returned to being.

One can easily see from that which has gone before, what happened to
Colonel McCorkle. Edgington and Alvord and Brassfield talked it over
in the Turkish room at Tony's after the caucuses.

"Of course you've made an ass of yourself, Edgington," said Mr.
Brassfield, "but you've gone through with it consistently, and it's all
right. I could have explained all that idiotic talk of mine about not
running--but why go over that now? Fill your glasses, and let's forget
it!"

"That's the talk!" said Alvord. "Forget it and all pull together in
this campaig