e no chance to change my mind and
fly his net. I was soon alone, staring dazedly at my windfall and
wondering if fortune would ever give me anything without attaching to it
that which would make me doubt whether my gift had more of bitter or
more of sweet in it.

Dunkirk announced the selection of a new chairman that very
afternoon,--as a forecast, of course, for there was the formality of my
"election" by the sixty-three members of the state committee to be gone
through. His proposition was well received. The old-line politicians
remembered my father; the Reformers recalled my fight against Dominick;
the business men liked my connection with the Ramsay Company, assuring
stability and regard for "conservatism"; the "boys" were glad because I
had a rich wife and a rich brother-in-law. The "boys" always cheer when
a man with money develops political aspirations.

I did not see Woodruff until I went down to the capital to begin my
initiation. I came upon him there, in the lobby of the Capital City
Hotel. As we talked for a moment like barely-acquainted strangers,
saying nothing that might not have been repeated broadcast, his look was
asking: "How did you manage to trap Dunkirk into doing it?" I never told
him the secret, and so never tore out the foundation of his belief in me
as a political wizard. It is by such judicious use of their few strokes
of good luck that successful men get their glamour of the superhuman. In
the eyes of the average man, who is lazy or intermittent, the result of
plain, incessant, unintermittent work is amazing enough. All that is
needed to make him cry, "Genius!" is a little luck adroitly exploited.

I left Woodruff, to join Dunkirk. "Who is that chap over there,--Doctor
Woodruff?" I asked him.

"Woodruff?" replied the Senator. "Oh, a lobbyist. He does a good deal
for Roebuck, I believe. An honest fellow,--for that kind,--they tell me.
It's always well to be civil to them."

Dunkirk's "initiation" of me into the duties of my office wiped away my
last lingering sense of double, or, at least, doubtful, dealing. He told
me nothing that was not calculated to mislead me. And he was so glib and
so frank and so sympathetic that, had I not known the whole machine from
the inside, I should have been his dupe.

It is not pleasant to suspect that, in some particular instance, one of
your fellow men takes you for a simple-minded fool. To know you are
being so regarded, not in one instance, but in gen