“You mean I ought to advertise?”
B. B. said that was exactly what he meant. And Wint was interested; he asked some questions. He had heard of advertising rates as things of astounding proportions; and so he was surprised to find that a full-page advertisement in the Journal would only cost him ten dollars. He laughed and said he could stand half a dozen of those. B. B. told him to put an advertisement in each Hardiston paper, and let them appear in every issue till the election. “Say the same thing, over and over, in different ways,” he advised. “Try it. You’ll be surprised.”
In the end, Wint decided to do just this. B. B. helped him write the advertisements. In them, Wint recited what he had done and what he meant to do, but briefly. In each full, black-lettered page, the burden of his song was just three words, repeated over and over:
“Vote for Chase; vote for Chase; vote for Chase.”
Amos came home toward the end of October; and when Wint heard he was in town, he telephoned and made arrangements to see him at his home that night. When he got there, Amos was upstairs. He called to Wint to go into the sitting room and wait, and Wint went in there and sat down. After a moment, Agnes came in to restore a book to its place on the shelves, and Wint got up and stood, talking with her. He thought she seemed uneasy, on edge. Her eyes went now and then through the open door toward the stairs down which Amos would come. She fumbled with her hair, and a lock became disarranged and fell down beside her face.
She said, abruptly, that there was something in her shoe; and she held to his arm with one hand, and stood on one foot, and pulled off her slipper and shook it, upside down. Then she seemed to lose her balance and toppled toward Wint; and he caught her in his arms. She straightened up and pushed him away with what seemed to him unnecessary force; and then turned and went swiftly out into the hall without a word. He looked after her, and saw Amos, halfway down the stairs, watching them with a curiously grave countenance; and Wint, for no reason in the world, was confused, and felt his face burning. He looked down and saw Agnes’s slipper on the floor, where she had dropped it; and he slid it out of sight under the bookcase before Amos came into the room. He was sorry as soon as he had done this; but Agnes had somehow contrived to make him feel guilty. He could hardly face Amos when the Congressman came into the room. He had a miserable feeling that everything was going wrong; all the trifles in the world seemed conspiring to harass him.
But Amos seemed to have seen nothing. He was perfectly amiable, bade Wint sit down, filled his black pipe, squinted at Wint with his head on one side and asked how things were going.
Wint said they were going badly; and Amos smiled.
“Why, now, that’s too bad,” he declared.
“I wasn’t made for a campaigner,” Wint said. “I’ll never be able to make a speech.”