e of
the girl beside her, and she smiled,--though even the smile was grim.

"All right," she said, holding out her hand to bind the bargain. "We'll
start and we'll stick. And here's hoping! We'd better lunch together,
hadn't we?"

CHAPTER VII. BY ANNE O'HAGAN

Mr. Benjamin Doolittle, by profession White-water's leading furniture
dealer and funeral director, and by the accident of political fortune
the manager of Mr. George Remington's campaign, sat in his candidate's
private office, and from time to time restrained himself from hasty
speech by the diplomatic and dexterous use of a quid of tobacco.

He found it difficult to preserve his philosophy in the face of George
Remington's agitation over the woman's suffrage issue.

"It's the last time," he had frequently informed his political cronies
since the opening of the campaign, "that I'll wet-nurse a new-fledged
candidate. They've got at least to have their milk teeth through if they
want Benjamin Doolittle after this." To George, itchingly aware through
all his rasped nerves of Mrs. Herrington's letter in that morning's
_Sentinel_ asking him to refute, if he could, an abominable half column
of statistics in regard to legislation in the Woman Suffrage States, the
furniture dealer was drawling pacifically:

"Now, George, you made a mistake in letting the women get your goat.
Don't pay no attention to them. Of course their game's fair enough. I
will say that you gave them their opening; stood yourself for a target
with that statement of yours. Howsomever, you ain't obligated to keep on
acting as the nigger head in the shooting gallery.

"Let 'em write; let 'em ask questions in the papers; let 'em heckle you
on the stump. All that you've got to say is that you've expressed your
personal convictions already, and that you've stood by those convictions
in your private life, and that as you ain't up for legislator, the
question don't really concern your candidacy. And that, as you're
running for district attorney, you will, with their kind permission,
proceed to the subjects that do concern you there--the condition of the
court calendar of Whitewater County, the prosecution of the racetrack
gamblers out at Erie Oval, and so forth, and so forth.

"You laid yourself open, George, but you ain't obligated in law or
equity to keep on presenting yourself bare chest for their outrageous
slings and arrows."

"Of course, what you say about their total irrelevancy is qu