"I only hope you'll be able to prove it, Gladys," he murmured, and watched Fernack grasp Corrio's arm with purposeful efficiency.
Part III
The well-meaning mayor
Sam Purdell never quite knew how he became Mayor. He was a small and portly man with a round blank face and a round blank mind, who had built up a moderately profitable furniture business over the last thirty-five years and acquired in the process a round pudding-faced wife and a couple of suet dumplings of daughters; but the inexhaustible zeal for improving the circumstances and morals of the community, that fierce drive of ambition and the twitching of the ears for the ecstatic screams of "Heil" whenever he went abroad, that indomitable urge to be a leader of his people from which Hitlers and Mussolinis are born, was not naturally in him.
It is true that at the local reform club, of which he was a prominent member, he had often been stimulated by an appreciative audience and a large highball to lay down his views on the way in which he thought everything on earth ought to be run, from Japanese immigration to the permissible percentage of sulphur dioxide in dried apricots; but there was nothing outstandingly indicative of a political future in that. This is a disease which is liable to attack even the most honest and respectable citizens in such circumstances. But the idea that he himself should ever occupy the position in which he might be called upon to put all those beautiful ideas into practice had never entered Sam Purdell's head in those simple early days; and if it had not been for the drive supplied by Al Eisenfeld, it might never have materialized.
"You ought to be in politics, Sam," Al had insisted, at the close of one of these perorations several years before.
Sam Purdell considered the suggestion.
"No, I wouldn't be clever enough," he said modestly.
To tell the truth, he had heard the suggestion before, had repudiated it before and had always wanted to hear it contradicted. Al Eisenfeld obliged him. It was the first time anybody had been so obliging.
This was three years before the columnist of the Elmford News was moved to inquire: