She was happy all that evening, though she denied that her own relief as to their position had aught to do with that happiness.
“He will be much more useful this term than he was before,” she told her father at supper. “Jerome always said, you know, that it took one term for a congressman to learn the ropes at Washington.”
Garwood reached home Sunday morning, and when he saw Emily waiting in the doorway something like pity for her smote him, and out of the flush of his new success he yearned toward her, so that, there in the old darkened hallway where the tender scene had been enacted so many times in other days, he folded her in his arms, and kissed her lips and her brow and her hair, and called her once more “Sweetheart.” And the happy little woman purred in his embrace, and as she hid her face against his breast, she said:
“My Jerome—my big Jerome!”
And it was all as it had been two years before. Only now, lifting her eyes to his, her face reddened with a blush as she said:
“You must come up and tell baby—he is dying to hear all about it.”
Emily vowed to Garwood that now the convention was over he must take a rest, and he was content for days to loll at home. He slept late in the morning and she bore his breakfast to him with his mail, or he stretched himself on the divan in the parlor in the afternoon while she read the newspapers to him until he would sink into slumber with the assurance that the room would be darkened and the house hushed until he chose to wake.
Pusey had nailed the party banner to his masthead as it were, and Emily read to Garwood with a laugh that could not conceal her pride the big types at the head of his editorial page:
“For Congress, Jerome B. Garwood.”
There day after day it remained, and she read it over and over, finding a certain joy in it. Pusey had printed a long editorial announcing his determination to support Garwood, and explaining with the conviction of the editorial page—where the argument is all one way, with no chance for rejoinder—his own action in voting for the candidate he had originally opposed.