ses, like the
widow's cruse. Some such master jest he played on Barbara.

An absorbing interest had catapulted into her life, and wakened her like
a bugle call. She had a fight on her hands and that means life to the
Irish. Her extraordinary marriage made little real difference in the
order of her days, except that she dined with an interesting man each
night. He talked to her of the things he hoped to do, if the people of
New York made him governor.

Always, except when political dinners or party caucus kept him too late,
she found him pacing the corridor outside her dressing-room. Courteous,
urbane, he took her to supper with friends, to a cafe, or back to the
hotel, where they had something to eat in Bob's sitting-room. This last
arrangement suited her best, for then she could lead him to talk of the
fight ahead. He sometimes asked her judgment. She felt his
single-purposed strength in these talks; she plumbed the force which had
made him a success at forty.

"Why do you always make me talk about myself?" he asked her on one of
these occasions of supper in her room.

"I want you to be interested," she retorted.

"You think me such an egotist?"

"I think all successful people are egotists. Success isn't an accident,
it is plan and work. You have to focus in on yourself all the time to
belong to the master-class."

"You don't talk about yourself--you're a success."

"Oh, we'll come to me. It's all 'quiet along the Potomac' with me just
now, but you're going into action."

"Think of the egotists who are not a success."

"Well, of course, a man who is merely in love with himself is in danger
of a mesalliance," she added, laughing.

"Go on! What is the saving grace for your egotists?"

"I hate to be so bromidic."

"I'm used to it."

"Oh!"

"Not in you--the rest of the world."

"New York nearly lost a governor!" she warned him. "I save my egotist
with a sense of humour, which is only a sense of proportion. Humour plus
purpose."

"What kind of purpose?"

"To be selfish for unselfish ends."

"Delightfully Irish," he admitted.

The talk never drifted from the impersonal. They both unconsciously
fought to keep up all the barriers of their formal relationship, but
they both were constantly peering over the wall into the other's
personality, hoping not to be caught at it.

The day came when Trent's candidacy for governor was announced by his
party. As he never saw Bob in the morning, the news came to