roduction to, and some of them don't even wait for an
introduction. They'd be after you if you were a Republican."

Bradley looked out upon it all with a growing shadow in his eyes. He
suddenly saw terrible results of this unwomanly struggle for office. He
saw back of it also the need for employment which really forced these
girls into such a contest.

"They soon learn," Cargill was saying, "where their strength lies. The
pretty ones and the bold ones succeed where the plain and timid ones
fail. It has its abuses. Good God, how could it be otherwise! It's a
part of our legislative rottenness. Legal labor pays so little, and
vice and corruption pay so well. Now see those two girls button-holing
that leprous old goat Bergheim! If it don't mean ruin to them both, it
will be because they're as knowing as he is. Every year this thing goes
on. What the friends and parents of these girls are thinking of, I'll
be damned if I know."

Bradley was dumb with the horror of it all. He had such an instinctive
reverence for women that this scene produced in him a profound, almost
despairing sorrow. He sat there after Cargill left him, and gazed upon
it all with stern eyes. There was no more tragical thing to him than
the woman who could willingly allure men for pay. It made him shudder
to see those bright, pretty girls go down among those men, whose hard,
peculiar, savage stare he knew almost as well as a woman.

They did not know that he was a legislator, and he escaped their
importunities; but he overheard several of them, as they came up with
some member--sometimes a married man--and took seats on the balcony
near him.

"But you had no business to promise Miss Jones! How could you when I
was living?"

"But I didn't know you then!"

"Well, then, now you've seen me, you can tell Miss Jones your contract
don't go," laughed the girl.

"Oh, that wouldn't do, she'd kick."

"Let'er kick. She aint got any people who are constituents. My people
are your constituents."

Bradley walked away sick at heart. As he passed a settee near the
stairway, he saw another girl with a childish face looking up at a
hard-featured young man, and saying with eager, wistful voice, her
hands clasped, "Oh, I _hope_ you can help me. I need it so much."

Her sweet face haunted him because of its suggested helplessness and
its danger. His heart swelled with an indefinable and bitter rebellion.
Everywhere was a scramble for office--everywhere a pouring