d Bradley.

"Free! Yes, they'd all be free if they had her brains."

"I don't know about that; conditions might still"--

"They'd make their own conditions."

"That's true. It all comes back to a question of human thinking,
doesn't it?"

This seemed a good point to leave off the discussion, and they walked
on mainly in silence, though two or three times during the walk Cargill
broke out in admiration. "I never saw a woman grow as that woman has.
That's the kind of a woman a man would never get tired of. I've never
married," he went on, with a sort of confession, "because I knew
perfectly well I'd get sick of my choice, but"--

He did not finish--it was hardly necessary; perhaps he felt he had gone
too far. They said good-night at the door of the Windom, and Bradley
went on up the avenue, his brain whirling with his new ideas and
emotions.

Ida had rushed away again into the far distance. It was utter
foolishness to think she could care for him. She was surrounded with
brilliant and wealthy men, while he was a poor young lawyer in a little
country town. He looked back upon the picture of himself sitting by her
side, there in the light of the fire, with deepening bewilderment. He
remembered the strange look upon her face as she rebuked Cargill. He
wondered if she did not care for him.

XXII.

THE JUDGE PLANS A NEW CAMPAIGN.

The first three or four weeks of legislative life sickened and
depressed Bradley. He learned in that time, not only to despise, but to
loath some of the legislators. The stench of corruption got into his
nostrils, and jovial vice passed before his eyes. The duplicity, the
monumental hypocrisy, of some of the leaders of legislation made him
despair of humankind and to doubt the stability of the republic.

He was naturally a pure-minded, simple-hearted man, and when one of the
leaders of the moral party of his State was dragged out of a low
resort, drunk and disorderly, in company with a leader of the Senate,
his heart failed him. He was ready to resign and go home.

Trades among the committees came obscurely to his ears; hints of jobs,
getting each day more definite, reached him. Railway lobbyists swarmed
about and began to lay their cajoling, persuasive hands upon members;
and he could not laugh when the newspaper said, for a joke, that the
absent-minded speaker called the House to order one morning by saying:
"Agents of the K. C. & Q. will _please_ be in order." It seemed too