She patted it, tenderly and affectionately, with a soft and reminiscent caress, so that the priest knew that it was not for anything that package of money might hold for her in a material way, then or afterward, but rather for what it gave back for a moment to her desolated heart. And the priest was glad of that, and thereafter silent. He had had doubts. He would feel better when the money had passed out of his hands, and he sometimes questioned whether it would ever do good in any one’s hands. But he had a sense of humor, too, a grim sense in this instance, when he thought of certain political and financial circles, even if he did dust his thin hands carefully with his spotless handkerchief when he laid the money down.
Annie’s eyes had filled with the ready tears that welled to their sweeping, black lashes, and trembled there as she raised her eyes to him.
“Ah, Father,” she said, “he was so, so good to me, always—and so kind! And see how thoughtful he was—to leave me all this! Oh, Jimmy, my poor Jimmy!”
And she rocked forward, like an old woman, and wept.
THE VINDICATION OF HENDERSON OF GREENE
BALDWIN, the lobbyist, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, and swaying with the train as it swung out on to the rocky ledge that paves the Valley of the Desplaines, contemplatively cut the end from a fresh cigar and said:
“But I’m not so sure, after all. My experience with the Bailey bill shook my faith in that proposition.”
The two other men in the salon looked up with startled eyes.
Baldwin had been driven over from his Michigan Avenue home and caught the Alton Limited when it made the station stop at Twenty-third Street, where he boarded the last of its curtained Pullmans. This coach was the political institution known to Illinois statesmanship as the Springfield sleeper, and Baldwin and his two companions, Jennings, the secretary of state, and Denny Healy, a canal commissioner, had the capsulated coziness of its smoking compartment all to themselves. Down by Dwight they had fallen into a desultory discussion of the old question as to whether or not every man has his price. The question could hardly interest these men long, for, after many years’ constant contemplation, under the gray dome of the state house, of the weaknesses of men, they had come to an acceptance of the doctrine now grown frank enough to have no lingering taint of cynicism. Jennings, indeed, had just dismissed the subject by declaring:
“All men aire fer sale, an’ most of ’em damn cheap.”