he price.

Five years passed and in each year Mrs. Handy had found some artificial
way of deluding herself that she was cheating time. Then Charley
Hedrick, who needed a vote in the legislature, and was too busy to go
there himself, nominated Abner Handy and elected him to a seat in the
lower house. The thing that Hedrick needed was not important--merely
the creation of a new judicial district which would remove an obnoxious
district judge in an adjoining county from our district, and leave our
county in a district by itself. Hedrick hated the judge, and Hedrick
used Handy's vote for trading purposes with other statesmen desiring
similar small matters and got the district remade as he desired it.

When the Handys started to Topeka for the opening of the session, they
began to inflame with importance as the train whistled for the junction
east of town, and by the time they actually arrived at Topeka they were
so highly swollen that they could not get into a boarding-house door,
but went to the best hotel, and engaged rooms at seven dollars a day.
The town gasped for two days and then began to laugh and wink. Two weeks
after their arrival at the State capital, Abner Handy had been made
chairman of the joint committee on the calendar, second member of the
judiciary committee and member of the railroad committee, and Mrs. Handy
had established credit at a Topeka dry-goods store and was going it
blind. She gave her hair an extra dip, and used to come sailing down
the corridors of the hotel in gorgeous silk house-gowns with ridiculous
trains, and never appeared at breakfast without her diamonds. Before the
session was well under way she had been to Kansas City to have her face
enameled and had told the other "ladies of the hotel," as the wives of
members of the legislature stopping at the hotel were called, that
Topeka stores offered such a poor selection; she confided to them that
Mr. Handy always wore silk nightshirts, and that she was unable to find
anything in town that he would put on. She regarded herself as a
charmer, and made great eyes at all the important lobbyists, to whom she
put on her baby voice and manner and said that she thought politics were
just simply awful, and added that if she were a man she would show them
how honest a politician could be, but she wasn't, and when Abner tried
to explain it to her it made her head ache, and all she wanted him to do
was to help his friends, and she would add coyly: "I'm