time being. Money's never been so plenty in Whitewater County
and this city is feelin' the benefits of it. People are buying
things--clothes, flour, furniture, victrolas, automobiles, rum.

"There ain't a merchant of any description in this county but his
business is booming on account of the work in the factories. You can't
antagonize the whole population of the place. Why, I dare say, some of
your own money and Mrs. Remington's is earning three times what it was
two years ago. The First National Bank has just declared a fifteen
per cent. dividend, and Martin Jaffry owns fifty-four per cent. of the
stock.

"You don't want to put brakes on prosperity. It ain't decent citizenship
to try it. It ain't neighborly. Think of the lean years we've known. You
can't do it. This war won't last forever--" Mr. Doolittle's voice was
tinged with regret--"and it will be time enough to go in for playing the
deuce with business when business gets slack again. That's the time for
reforms, George,--when things are dull."

George was silent, the very presentment of a sorely harassed young man.
He had not, even in a year when blamelessness rather than experience
was his party's supreme need in a candidate, become its banner bearer
without possessing certain political apperceptions. He knew, as Benjie
Doolittle spoke, that Benjie spoke the truth--White-water city and
county would never elect a man who had too convincingly promised to
interfere with the prosperity of the city and county.

"Better stick to the gambling out at Erie Oval, George," counseled the
campaign manager. "They're mostly New Yorkers that are interested in
that, anyway."

"I'll not reply without due consideration and--er--notice," George
sullenly acceded to his manager and to necessity. But he hated both
Doolittle and necessity at the moment.

That sun-bright vision of himself which so splendidly and sustainingly
companioned him, which spoke in his most sonorous periods, which so
completely and satisfyingly commanded the reverence of Genevieve--that
George Remington of his brave imaginings would not thus have answered
Benjamin Doolittle.

Through the silence following the furniture man's departure, Betty, at
the typewriter, clicked upon Georgie's ears. An evil impulse assailed
him--impolitic, too, as he realized--impolitic but irresistible. It was
the easiest way in which candidate Remington, heckled by suffragists,
overridden by his campaign committee, mortifyingl