and his enormous
folded chin in his two hands. So he sat, a monstrous figure, with his
great paunch filling his white shirt like a concealed balloon, with his
hideously hairy arms naked halfway, and his thick hands purple beneath
the weight of his amorphously fat face, his little reptilian eyes
staring at the opposite wall.

He was at his wits' end. He was not making good at his business, and he
knew it. What was worse, everybody else knew it. He had had few callers
of late. Campaign collections had dwindled to almost nothing. They were
getting bold in their refusals to contribute at all. "Why didn't he do
something?" "What were they paying him for if it was not to do
something?" "Was he going to let a set of fanatical women down him and
take things in their own hands?" These were some of the questions they
asked him which he could not answer satisfactorily. In vain he advised
patience, and even more vainly he vowed he could and would stop the
women's damphulishness at the proper time. They did not believe him;
they pointed out that business had already stopped. From being the one
who threatened, he had become the one who cajoled, while every man who
came in offered him veiled threats instead of dollars.

He was furious, and he was obliged to conceal his fury. He hated these
rebellious men even more than he hated the upstart women. He was
determined, if the opportunity offered, to be revenged upon them for
their insolence. But how? This was the matter he revolved in his
snake-licking mind as he stared at the wall, and he was in a hurry to
reach a solution of his difficulty. Stark Coleman had called him before
he was out of bed that morning to say that there had been a citizens'
meeting the night before, and that he, Coleman, would be up to see him
at ten o'clock. In the first place, why had he not been notified of the
citizens' meeting. He usually presided on these occasions when the
tutelary deities of Jordantown gathered in Coleman's office, or more
frequently in his own office, to discuss the ways and means by which the
principles of the Democratic party could be made to contribute most
liberally to the liberty of man, especially in Jordantown. In the second
place, the tone of Coleman's voice was cool, offensively so. He detected
a note of command in it. Suppose Coleman should be coming up to inform
him of certain changes in the policy which would govern the
manifestations of the democratic principle? In short, sup