with me.
Sandys had no interest in politics--his fortune was in real estate and,
therefore, did not tempt or force him into relations with political
machines.

Early in the morning after my arrival I got away from the others and,
with a stag-hound who remembered me with favor from my last visit,
struck into woods that had never been despoiled by man. As I tramped on
and on, my mind seemed to revive, and I tried to take up the plots and
schemes that had been all-important yesterday. But I could not. Instead,
as any sane man must when he and nature are alone and face to face, I
fell to marveling that I could burn up myself, the best of me, the best
years of my one life, in such a fever of folly and fraud as this
political career of mine. I seemed to be in a lucid interval between
paroxysms of insanity. I reviewed the men and things of my world as one
recalls the absurd and repellent visions of a nightmare. I shrank from
passing from this mood of wakefulness and reason back into the unreal
reality of what had for years been my all-in-all. I wandered hour after
hour, sometimes imagining that I was flying from the life I loathed,
again that somewhere in those cool, green, golden-lighted mazes I should
find--my lost youth, and her. For, how could I think of _it_ without
thinking of _her_ also? It had been lighted by her; it had gone with
her; it lived in memory, illumined by her.

The beautiful, beautiful world-that-ought-to-be! The hideous, the
horrible world-that-is!

I did not return to the house until almost dinner-time. "I have to go
away to-morrow morning," I announced after dinner. For I felt that, if I
did not fly at once, I should lose all heart for the task which must be
finished.

"Why," protested Sandys, "you came to stay until we all started with you
for St. Louis."

"I must go," I repeated. I did not care to invent an excuse; I could
not give the reason. Had I followed my impulse, I should have gone at
once, that night.

By noon the next day I had again flung myself into the vexed political
ocean whose incessant buffetings give the swimmers small chance to think
of anything beyond the next oncoming wave.

XIX

DAVID SENT OUT AGAINST GOLIATH

I was almost master of myself again when, a week later, I got aboard the
car in which Carlotta and I were taking our friends to look on at the
opposition's convention at St. Louis.

When we arrived, I went at once to confer with Merriweather in a room