Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson was extremely adroit and careful in concealing her connection with the law-making of the State. She was in evidence in most public places; at the theatres, the concert halls, the County Club races, and at every fashionable entertainment to which her cleverness could procure her admission, her conspicuous figure, made more prominent by a certain indefinable loudness of style, a marked dash of manner, and gowns in a taste rather daring than refined, was too conspicuous to be overlooked. Yet it is doubtful if she had ever been up the steps leading to the gilded-domed capitol in her life. She went about much; and the unchaperoned life which in virtue of her widowhood and her love of freedom she chose to lead, the width of the circle over which her acquaintance extended, allowed her to carry on her work unobserved; so that while a great variety of stories of one sort of queerness or another were told of Mrs. Sampson, this particular side of her career was almost unknown.
"There is Mr. Greenfield," Mrs. Sampson observed, tapping her teeth with her pencil. "His wife was a cousin of my husband. I don't know them at all, but I could easily ask him to come and see me. It would be only proper to offer him the hospitality of the town, you know."
"Good!" cried Mr. Irons, slapping his open palm down on his knee. "Greenfield's the hardest nut we've got to crack in the whole business. He's the sort of man you can't talk to on a square business basis. You've got to mince things damned fine with him, and he's chairman of the Railroad Committee, you know. He'd have a tremendous amount of influence, anyway."
"He's a little tin god at Fentonville, I've heard," Mrs. Sampson responded, laughing in the mechanical way which was her habit. "When he's at home they say the sun doesn't rise there till he's given his permission."
Irons in his excitement took his leg down from its supporting chair and sat up straight, dropping his list of members to the floor and clasping his knees with his heavy hands.
"Now look here, old lady," he said, "here's a chance to show your mettle. If you'll manage Greenfield, I'll run the rest of the hayseed crowd, and I'll make it something handsomer than you ever had in your life."
The woman smiled a smile of greed and cunning.
"I'll take care of him," she said. "And he shall never know he has been taken care of either."
Irons laughed with coarse jocoseness.
"A man has very little chance that falls into your clutches," he observed, "but in this particular case you've got a heavy contract on hand. Greenfield's got his price, of course, like everybody else, but I'm hanged if I know what it is. If you offered him tin he'd simply fly out on the whole thing and nobody could hold him. There isn't any particular pull in politics on him. This new-fashioned independence has knocked all that to pieces; and Greenfield is an Independent from the word go. I don't know what you're to bait your hook with, unless it's your lovely self."