Her Infinite Variety. Brand Whitlock
if I’d let you!”
They were silent after that, and Amelia sat with her elbow on the arm of her chair, her chin in her hand, meditating gloomily on her ruined dinner.
“If you did any good by being in politics,” she said, as if speaking to herself. “But I fail to see what good you do. What good do you do?” She lifted her head suddenly and challenged him with a high look.
“Well,” he said, spreading his hands wide, “of course, if you don’t care enough to look in the newspapers!”
“But how could I, Morley?” said Amelia. “How was I to know where to look?”
“Why, in the Springfield despatches.”
“I began by reading the papers,” Amelia said. “But, really now, Morley, you know I couldn’t find anything in them about you.”
“The most important work in the legislature isn’t done in the newspapers,” said Vernon, with a significance that was intended to hide his inconsistency. “There are committee meetings, and conferences and caucuses; it is there that policies are mapped out and legislation framed.”
He spoke darkly, as of secret sessions held at night on the upper floors of hotels, attended only by those who had received whispered invitations.
“But if you must be in politics,” she said, “why don’t you do something big, something great, something to make a stir? Show your friends that you are really accomplishing something!”
Amelia sat erect and gave a strenuous gesture with one of her little fists clenched. Her dark eyes showed the excitement of ambition. But Vernon drooped and placed his hand wearily to his brow. Instantly Amelia started up from her chair.
“Does that light annoy you?” Her tone was altogether different from her ambitious one. She was stretching out a hand toward the lamp, and the white flesh glowed red between her fingers, held against the light.
“Never mind,” said Vernon. “It doesn’t bother me.”
But Amelia rose and twisted the shade of the lamp about, and then, as she was taking her seat again, she went on:
“I suppose it’ll be worse than ever after—after we’re—married.” She faltered, and blushed, and began making little pleats in her handkerchief, studying the effect with a sidewise turn of her head.
Vernon bent over and took both her hands in his.
“If it were only Washington!” There was a new regret in her tone, as there was in the inclination of her head.
“It shall be Washington, dear,” he said.
Amelia’s eyelids fell and she blushed again, even in the glow the lamp shed upon her face. They were silent for a moment, and then suddenly she looked up.
“Washington would be ever so much better, Morley,” she said. “I should feel as if that really amounted to something. We’d know all the diplomats, and I’m sure in that atmosphere you would become a great man.”
“I will, dear; I will,” he declared, “but it will be all for you.”
II
WHEN Vernon went into the Senate that Tuesday morning and saw the red rose lying on his desk he smiled, and picking it up, raised it eagerly to his face. But when he glanced about the chamber and saw that a rose lay on every other desk, his smile was suddenly lost in a stare of amazement. Once or twice, perhaps, flowers had been placed by constituents on the desks of certain senators, but never had a floral distribution, at once so modest and impartial, been made before. Several senators, already in their seats, saw the check this impartiality gave Vernon’s vanity, and they laughed. Their laughter was of a tone with the tinkle of the crystal prisms of the chandeliers, chiming in the breeze that came through the open windows.
The lieutenant-governor was just ascending to his place. He dropped his gavel to the sounding-board of his desk.
“The Senate will be in order,” he said.
The chaplain rose, and the hum of voices in the chamber ceased. Then, while the senators stood with bowed heads, Vernon saw the card that lay on the desk beside the rose. Two little jewels of the moisture that still sparkled on the rose’s petals shone on the glazed surface of the card. Vernon read it where it lay.
“Will the Hon. Morley Vernon please to wear this rose to-day as a token of his intention to support and vote for House Joint Resolution No. 19, proposing an amendment to Section 1, Article VII, of the Constitution?”
The noise in the chamber began again at the chaplain’s “Amen.”
“New way to buttonhole a man, eh?” said Vernon to Bull Burns, who had the seat next Vernon’s. “What’s it all about, anyway?”
Vernon took up his printed synopsis of bills and resolutions.
“Oh, yes,” he said, speaking as much to himself as to Burns; “old man Ames’s resolution.” Then he turned to the calendar. There it was—House Joint Resolution No. 19. He glanced at Burns again. Burns was fastening his rose in his buttonhole.
“So you’re for it, eh?” he said.
“To hell with it,” Burns growled in the gruff voice that spoke for the First District. In trying to look down at his own adornment he screwed his fat neck, fold on fold, into his low collar and then, with a grunt of satisfaction, lighted a morning cigar.
“But—” Vernon began, surprises multiplying. He looked about the chamber. The secretary was reading the journal of the preceding day and the senators were variously occupied, reading newspapers, writing letters, or merely smoking; some were gathered in little groups, talking and laughing. But they all wore their roses. Vernon might have concluded that House Joint Resolution No. 19 was safe, had it not been for the inconsistency of Burns, though inconsistency was nothing new in Burns. Vernon ventured once more with his neighbor:
“Looks as if the resolution were as good as adopted, doesn’t it?”
But Burns cast a glance of pity at him, and then growled in half-humorous contempt. The action stung Vernon. Burns seemed to resent his presence in the Senate as he always resented the presence of Vernon’s kind in politics.
The rose still lay on Vernon’s desk; he was the only one of the fifty-one senators of Illinois that had not put his rose on. He opened his bill file and turned up House Joint Resolution No. 19. He read it carefully, as he felt a senator should before making up his mind on such an important, even revolutionary measure. He remembered that at the time it had been adopted in the House, every one had laughed; no one, with the exception of its author, Doctor Ames, had taken it seriously.
Ames was known to be a crank; he was referred to as “Doc” Ames, usually as “Old Doc” Ames. He had introduced more strange bills and resolutions than any member at that session; bills to curb the homeopathists, bills to annihilate English sparrows, bills to prohibit cigarettes, bills to curtail the liquor traffic, and now this resolution providing for the submission of an amendment to the Constitution that would extend the electoral franchise to women.
His other measures had received little consideration; he never got any of them out of committee. But on the female suffrage resolution he had been obdurate, and when—with a majority so bare that sick men had to be borne on cots into the House now and then to pass its measures—the party had succeeded, after weeks of agony, in framing an apportionment bill that satisfied every one, Doctor Ames had seen his chance. He had flatly refused to vote for the reapportionment act unless his woman-suffrage resolution were first adopted.
It was useless for the party managers to urge upon him the impossibility of providing the necessary two-thirds’ vote; Ames said he could get the remaining votes from the other side. And so the steering committee had given the word to put it through for him. Then the other side, seeing a chance to place the majority in an embarrassing attitude before the people, either as the proponents or the opponents of such a radical measure—whichever way it went in the end—had been glad enough to furnish the additional votes. The members of the steering committee had afterward whispered it about that the resolution