“Did you see Mr. Rankin?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” she said hopefully, with the faith they had always held in Rankin, “he can bring it around all right, can’t he?”
“He!” said Garwood. “He’s a back number!”
She drew the story out of him, and when she had done so, she said:
“Well, you don’t forget, Jerome, that you once said to me that we must be good to Jim Rankin.”
He made no reply for a long time, and she followed him with eyes that looked large in her thin face. After awhile, he paused in trying to unbutton his collar, and turned his head around, his chin thrust pointedly out over his hands.
“If I were out of debt,” he said, “I’d quit the whole business and open a law office in Chicago, and let politics alone.”
It was a common threat with him when he was discouraged. And she had long since learned that the threat to leave politics was common to all politicians, just as the threat to leave the sea is common to all sailors, or the threat to leave newspaper work to all newspaper men. She felt herself the fascination of the life, and so knew the insincerity of the threat.
“Oh, you always say that when you’re blue. Don’t worry any more to-night.”