At this the righteous exaltation began rather abruptly to simmer down in the soul of Alonzo Rawson. He saw the consequences of too violently reversing, and knew how difficult they might be to face.
“Well, not—not exactly,” he said weakly. “I expect our best plan would be for me to lay kind of low and not say any more about the bill at all. Of course, I'll quit workin' against it; and on the roll-call I'll edge up close to the clerk and say 'Aye' so that only him'll hear me. That's done every day—and I—well, I don't just exactly like to come out too publicly for it, after my speech and all I've done against it.”
She looked at him sharply for a short second, and then offered him her hand and said: “Let's shake hands now, on the vote. Think what a triumph it is for me to know that I helped to show you the right.”
“Yes ma'am,” he answered confusedly, too much occupied with shaking her hand to know what he said. She spoke one word in an undertone to the driver and the machine took the very shortest way back to the city.
After this excursion, several days passed, before Mrs. Protheroe came to the State house again. Rawson was bending over the desk of Senator Josephus Battle, the white-bearded leader of the opposition to the “Sunday Baseball Bill,” and was explaining to him the intricacies of a certain drainage measure, when Battle, whose attention had wandered, plucked his sleeve and whispered:
“If you want to see a mighty pretty woman that's doin' no good here, look behind you, over there in the chair by the big fireplace at the back of the room.”
Alonzo looked.
It was she whose counterpart had been in his dream's eye every moment of the dragging days which had been vacant of her living presence. A number of his colleagues were hanging over her almost idiotically; her face was gay and her voice came to his ears, as he turned, with the accent of her cadenced laughter running through her talk like a chime of tiny bells flitting through a strain of music.
“This is the third time she's been here,” said Battle, rubbing his beard the wrong way. “She's lobbyin' for that infernal Sabbath-Desecration bill, but we'll beat her, my son.”
“Have you made her acquaintance, Senator?” asked Alonzo stiffly.