“Say,” sighed Caleb Conover in perfect content, “this is the happiest night ever! I’ve got everything there is in life for a man. All the money I want, the running of the State, a place in society at last, a daughter that’s a princess, a boy that’s making his mark in the biggest city in America, and now—the governorship. Lord! but I’m a lucky man. And that speech—I didn’t think I had it in me. Of course, I know those snobs from the Pompton Avenue crowd were dragged here by the ears. I had to drag pretty hard, too, in most cases. But they’re here. And they listened to me. They had to. And they can’t ever look on me just as they did before.”
“No,” assented Anice, “they can’t.”
To her there was something impersonally pathetic in the way this usually keen, stern man had unbent and made himself ridiculous. She was the only person living in whose presence, as a rule, he expanded. She was used to the semi-occasional talkative, boastful moods of this Boss whom all the rest of the world deemed as sharp, and concise as a steel trap—and as deadly. Yet never had even she seen him like this before.
It was sad, she mused, that Samson, shorn of his locks of self-restraint and of his calculating coolness, should thus have made sport for the Philistines. That he had perhaps done so for a purpose—even though for once in his life it was a futile purpose—rendered his folly no less humiliating.
“Yes,” reiterated Conover, as he prepared to return to his own table. “It was an inspiration. And an ounce of inspiration discounts a half-ton of any other commodity that ever passed over the counter.”
“What was it like?” rhapsodized Billy Shevlin at 2 A.M., as he gazed loftily upon a semicircle of humbler querists in the back room of Kerrigan’s saloon. “It was like the King of England an’ one of them Fashion Joinals an’ a lake of $4-a-bottle suds, all mixed; with a Letter Carriers’ Ball on the side. And”—he added, in a glow of divine memories—“I was ace-high with the biggest of the push. If I hadn’t a’ been, would the Van Alstyne dame a’ stood for it so civil when I treads on the train of her Sunday regalia and rips about ten yards of the fancy tatting off’n it?”
“What was it like?” echoed Mrs. Greer to a query of one of her daughters who had sat up to await the parental home-coming. “It was something clear outside the scriptural prohibition of swearing. For it was like nothing in ‘the heavens above, or the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth.’”
“What was it like?” thought Clive Standish drowsily as he fell asleep. “A dozen people are certain to ask me that to-morrow. It—her—her eyes have that same old queer way—of making me feel as if—I were in church.”
CHAPTER III
CALEB CONOVER REGRETS
Caleb Conover, Railroader, was in a humor when all the household thought well to tread softly.