The next few weeks were not agreeable ones to Richard Amory. There was too much feverish anxiety and uncertainty in them. He had not yet acquired the coolness and hardihood of experience, and he felt their lack in himself. He had a great deal at stake, more than at the outset it had seemed possible he could have under any circumstances. He began to realize, with no little discomfort, that he had run heavier risks than he had intended to allow himself to be led into running. When they rose before him in their full magnitude, as they did occasionally when affairs assumed an unencouraging aspect, he wished his enthusiasm had been less great. It could not be said that he had reached remorse for, or actual repentance of, his indiscretions; he had simply reached a point when discouragement led him to feel that he might be called upon to repent by misfortune. Up to this time it had been his habit to drive up to the Capitol in his coupé, to appear in the galleries, to saunter through the lobby, and to flit in and out of committee-rooms with something of the air of an amateur rather enjoying himself; he had made himself popular; his gayety, his magnetic manner, his readiness to be all things to all men had smoothed his pathway for him, while his unprofessional air had given him an appearance of harmlessness.

"He\'s a first-rate kind of fellow to have on the ground when a thing of this sort is going on," one of the smaller satellites once remarked. "Nobody\'s afraid of being seen with him. There\'s an immense deal in that. There are fellows who come here who can half ruin a man with position by recognizing him on the street. Regular old hands they are, working around here for years, making[Pg 376] an honest living out of their native land. Every one knows them and what they are up to. Now, this one is different, and that wife of his"—

"What has she been doing?" flung in Planefield, who was present. "What has she got to do with it?"

He said it with savage uneasiness. He was full of restive jealousy and distrust in these days.

"I was only going to say that she is known in society," he remarked, "and she is the kind the most particular of those fellows don\'t object to calling on."

But, as matters took form and a more critical point was neared; as the newspapers began to express themselves on the subject of the Westoria lands scheme, and prophesy its failure or success; as it became the subject of editorials applauding the public-spiritedness of those most prominent in it, or of paragraphs denouncing the corrupt and self-seeking tendency of the times; as the mental temperature of certain individuals became a matter of vital importance, and the degree of cordiality of a greeting an affair of elation or despair,—Richard felt that his air of being an amateur was becoming a thing of the past. He was too anxious to keep it up well; he did not sleep at night, and began to look fagged, and it required an effort to appear at ease.

"Confound it!" he said to Planefield, "how can one be at ease with a man when his yes or no may be success or destruction to you? It makes him of too much consequence. A fellow finds himself trying to please, and it spoils his manner. I never knew what it was to feel a human being of any particular consequence before."

"You have been lucky," commented Planefield, not too tolerantly.

"I have been lucky," Richard answered; "but I\'m not lucky now, and I shall be deucedly unlucky if that bill doesn\'t pass. The fact is, there are times when I half wish I hadn\'t meddled with it."

"The mistake you made," said Planefield, with stolid ill-humor, "was in letting Mrs. Amory go away. Now[Pg 377] is the time you need her most. There\'s no denying that there are some things women can do better than men; and when a man has a wife as clever as yours, and as much of a social success, he\'s blundering when he doesn\'t call on her for assistance. One or two of her little dinners would be the very things just now for the final smoothing down of one or two rough ones who haven\'t opinions unless you provide them with them. She\'d provide them with them fast enough. They\'d only have one opinion when she\'d done with them, if she was in one of the moods I\'ve seen her in sometimes. Look how she carried Bowman and Pell off their feet the night she gave them the description of that row in the House. And Hargis, of North Carolina, swears by her; he\'s a simple, domesticated fellow, and was homesick the night I brought him here, and she found it out,—Heaven knows how,—and talked to him about his wife and children until he said he felt as if he\'d seen them. He told me so with tears in his eyes. It is that kind of thing we want now."

"Well," said Richard, nervously, "it isn\'t at our disposal. I don\'t mind telling you that she was rather out of humor with the aspect of affairs before she went away, and I had one interview with her which showed me it would be the safest plan to let her go."

"Out of humor!" said Planefield. "She has been a good deal out of humor lately, it seems to me. Not that it\'s any business of mine; but it\'s rather a pity, considering circumstances."

Richard colored, walked a few steps, put his hands in his pockets, and took them out again. Among the chief sources of anxious trouble to him had been that of late he had found his companion rather difficult to get along with. He had been irritable, and even a trifle overbearing, and had at times exhibited an indifference to results truly embarrassing to contemplate, in view of the crisis at hand. When he intrenched himself behind a certain heavy stubbornness, in which he was specially[Pg 378] strong, Richard felt himself helpless. The big body, the florid face, the doggedly unresponsive eye, were too much to combat against. When he was ill-humored Richard knew that he endeavored to conciliate him; but when this mood held possession he could only feel alarm and ask himself if it could be possible that, after all, the man might be brutal and false enough to fail him. There were times when he sat and looked at him unwillingly, fascinated by the likeness he found in him to the man who had sent poor Westor to his doom. Naturally, the old story had been revived of late, and he heard new versions of it and more minute descriptions of the chief actors, and it was not difficult for an overwrought imagination to discover in the two men some similarity of personal characteristics. Just at this moment there rose within him a memory of a point of resemblance between the pair which would have been extremely embarrassing to him if he had permitted it to assume the disagreeable form of an actual fact. It was the resemblance between the influences which had moved them. In both cases it had been a woman,—in this case it was his own wife, and if he had not been too greatly harassed he would have appreciated the indelicacy of the situation. He was not an unrefined person in theory, and his sensitiveness would have caused him to revolt at the grossness of such a position if he had not had so much at stake and been so overborne by his associates. His mistakes and vices were always the result of circumstance and enthusiasm, and he hurried past them with averted eyes, and refused to concede to them any substantiality. There is nothing more certain than that he had never allowed himself to believe that he had found Bertha of practical use in rendering Planefield docile and attracting less important luminaries. Bertha had been very charming and amiable, that was all; she was always so; it was her habit to please people,—her nature, in fact,—and she had only done what she always did. As a mental statement[Pg 379] of the case, nothing could be more simple than this, and he was moved to private disgust by his companion\'s aggressive clumsiness, which seemed to complicate matters and confront him with more crude suggestions.

"I am afraid she would not enjoy your way of putting it," he said.

Planefield shut his teeth on his cigar and looked out of the window. That was his sole response, and was a form of bullying he enjoyed.

"We must remember that—that she does not realize everything," continued Richard, uneasily; "and she has not regarded the matter from any serious stand-point. It is my impression," he added, with a sudden sense of growing irritation, "that she wouldn\'t have anything to do with it if she thought it was a matter of gain or loss!"

Planefield made no movement. He was convinced that this was a lie, and his look out of the window was his reply to it.

Richard put his hands into his pockets again and turned about, irritated and helpless.

"You must have seen yourself how unpractical she is," he exclaimed. "She is a mere child in business matters. Any one could deceive her."

He stopped and flushed without any apparent reason. He found himself looking out of the window too, with a feeling of most unpleasant confusion. He was obliged to shake it off before he spoke again, and when he did so it was with an air of beginning with a fresh subject.

"After all," he said, "everything does not depend upon influence of that sort. There are other things to be considered. Have you seen Blundel?"

"You can\'t expect a man like Blundel," said Planefield, "to be easy to manage. Blundel is the possessor of a moral character, and when a man has capital like that—and Blundel\'s sharpness into the bargain—he is not going to trifle with it. He\'s going to hang on to it[Pg 380] until it reaches its highest market value, and then decide which way he will invest it."

Richard dropped into a seat by the table. He felt his forehead growing damp.

"But if we are not sure of Blundel?" he exclaimed.

"Well, we are not sure of Blundel," was the answer. "What we have to hope is that he isn\'t sure of himself. The one thing you can\'t be sure of is a moral character. Impeccability is rare, and it is never easy for an outsider to hit on its exact value. It varies, and you have to run risks with it. Blundel\'s is expensive."

"There has been a great deal of money used," hesitated Richard; "a great deal."

Planefield resorted to the window again. It had not been his money that had been used. He had sufficient intellect to reap advantages where they were to be reaped, and to avoid indiscreet adventures.

"You had better go and see Blundel yourself," he said, after a pause. "I have had a talk with him, and made as alluring a statement of the case as I could, with the proper degree of caution, and he has had time to put the matter in the scales with his impeccability and see which weighs the heavier, and if they can\'t be made to balance. He will try to balance them, but if he can\'t—You must settle what is to be done between you. I have done my best."

"By Jove!" exclaimed Richard, virtuously, "what corruption!"

It was an ingenuous ejaculation, but he was not collected enough to appreciate the native candor of it himself at the moment. He felt that he was being hardly treated, and that the most sacred trusts of a great nation were in hands likely to betray them at far too high a figure. The remark amounted to an outburst of patriotism.

"Have they all their price?" he cried.

Planefield turned his head slowly and glanced at him over his shoulder.

[Pg 381]

"No," he said; "if they had, you\'d find it easier. There\'s your difficulty. If they were all to be bought, or none of them were to be sold, you\'d see your way."

It did not seem to Richard that his way was very clear at the present moment. At every step of late he had found new obstacles in his path and new burdens on his shoulders. People had so many interests and so many limitations, and the limitations were always related to the interests. He began to resolve that it was a very sordid and business-like world in which human lot was cast, and to realize that the tendency of humanity was to coarse prejudice in favor of itself.

"Then I had better see Blundel at once," he said, with feverish impatience.

"You haven\'t any time to lose," was Planefield\'s cool response. "And you will need all the wit you can carry with you. You are not going to offer him inducements, you know; you are only going to prove to him that his chance to do something for his country lies before him in the direction of the Westoria lands. After that"—

"After that," repeated Richard, anxiously.

"Do what you think safest and most practicable."

As the well-appointed equipage drew up under the archway before the lower entrance to the north wing of the Capitol, a group of men who stood near the door-way regarded it with interest. They did so because three of them were strangers and sight-seers, and the fourth, who was a well-seasoned Washingtonian, had called their attention to it.

"There," he said, with an experienced air, "there is one of them this moment. It is beginning to be regarded as a fact that he is mixed up with one of the biggest jobs the country has ever known. He is up to his ears in this Westoria business, it\'s believed, though he professes to be nothing more than a sort of interested looker-on and a friend of the prime movers. He\'s a gentleman, you see, with a position in society, and a[Pg 382] pretty wife, who is a favorite, and the pretty wife entertains his friends; and when a man is in an uncertain frame of mind the husband invites him to dinner, and the pretty wife interests herself in him,—she knows how to do it, they say,—and he goes away a wiser and a better man, and more likely to see his way to making himself agreeable. Nothing professional about it, don\'t you see? All quite proper and natural. No lobbying about that, you know; but it helps a bill through wonderfully. I tell you there\'s no knowing what goes on in these tip-top parlors about here."

He said it with modest pride and exultation, and his companions were delighted. They represented the average American, with all his ingenuous eagerness for the dramatic exposure of crime in his fellow-man. They had existed joyously for years in the belief that Washington was the seat of corruption, bribery, and fraud; that it was populated chiefly with brilliant female lobbyists and depraved officials, who carried their privileges to market and bartered and sold them with a guileless candor, whose temerity was only to be equalled by its brazen cheerfulness of spirit. They were, probably, not in the least aware of their mental attitude toward their nation\'s government; but they revelled in it none the less, and would have felt a keen pang of disappointment if they had been suddenly confronted with the fact that there was actually an element of most unpicturesque honesty in the House and a flavor of shameless impeccability in the Senate. They had heard delightful stories of "jobs" and "schemes," and had hoped to hear more. When they had been taken to the visitors\' gallery, they had exhibited an earnest anxiety to be shown the members connected with the last investigation, and had received with private rapture all anecdotes connected with the ruling political scandal. They decided that the country was in a bad way, and felt a glow of honest pride in its standing up at all in its present condition of rottenness. Their ardor had been a little[Pg 383] dampened by an incautious statement made by their friend and guide, to the effect that the subject of the investigation seemed likely to clear himself of the charges made against him, and the appearance of Richard Amory, with his personal attractions, his neat equipage, and his air of belonging to the great world, was something of a boon to them. They wished his wife had been with him; they had only seen one female lobbyist as yet, and she had been merely a cheap, flashy woman, with thin, rouged cheeks and sharp, eager eyes.

"Looks rather anxious, doesn\'t he?" one asked the other, as Amory went by. He certainly looked anxious as he passed them; but once inside the building he made an effort to assume something of his usual air of gay good cheer. It would not do to present himself with other than a fearless front. So he walked with a firm and buoyant tread through the great vaulted corridors and u............