“Sir!” cried the reputable old gentleman haughtily, “I have no interest save the interest of The public.”
“So you say,” I retorted, “and doubtless so you think.” I had a desire to quarrel finally and for all time with the reputable old gentleman, whose name I no longer needed, and whose fame as an excise purist would now be getting in my way. “You deceive yourself,” I went on. “Your prime motive is to tickle your own vanity with a pretense of elevation. From the pedestal of your millions, and the safe shelter of a clean white shirt, you patronize mankind and play the prig. That is what folk say of you. As to what obligation in your favor rests personally upon myself, I have only to recall your treatment of my candidate for that place of chamberlain.”
“Do you say men call me a prig?” demanded the reputable old gentleman with an indignant start. He ignored his refusal of the eminent one as chamberlain.
“Sir, I deny the term 'prig.' If such were my celebration, I should not have waited to hear it from you.”
“What should you hear or know of yourself?” said I. “The man looking from his window does not see his own house. He who marches with it, never sees the regiment of which he is a unit. No more can you, as mayor, see yourself, or estimate the common view concerning you. It is your vanity to seem independent and above control, and you have transacted that vanity at the expense of your friends. I've stood by while others went that road, and politically at least it ever led down hill.”
That was my last conference with the reputable old gentleman. I went back to Fourteenth Street, and called on my people of Tammany to do their utmost. Nor should I complain of their response, for they went behind their batteries with the cool valor of buccaneers.
There was but one question which gave me doubt, and that was the question of the Australian ballot, then a novelty in our midst. Theretofore, a henchman of the machine went with that freeman to the ballot-box, and saw to it how he put no cheat upon his purchasers. Now our commissioners could approach a polls no nearer than two hundred feet; the freeman went in alone, took his folded ticket from the judges, retired to privacy and a pencil, and marked his ballot where none might behold the work. Who then could know that your mercenary, when thus removed from beneath one's eye and hand, would fight for one's side? I may tell you the situation was putting a wrinkle in my brow when Morton came lounging in.
“You know I've nothing to do with the old gentleman's campaign,” said he, following a mouthful or two of commonplace, and puffing the while his usual cigarette. “Gad! I told him that I had withdrawn from politics; I did, really! I said it was robbing me of all fineness; and that I must defend my native purity of sensibility, don't y' know, and preserve it from such sordid contact.
“'Father,' said I, 'you surely would not, for the small cheap glory of a second term, compel me into experiences that must leave me case-hardened in all that is spiritual?'
“No, he made no reply; simply turned his back upon me in merited contempt. Really, I think he was aware of me for a hypocrite. It was beastly hard to go back on the old boy, don't y' know! But for what I have in mind it was the thing to do.”