CARMEL wondered how one went about it to obtain a private interview with a Governor. She was still young enough and inexperienced enough in life’s valuations to regard a man in that position as necessarily above the ordinary run of men. His office invested him with a certain glamour, a fictitious greatness. Governors, Senators, Presidents! Youth invested them with a terrific dignity. It is somewhat difficult, even for the wise and prudent, to see the man apart from his vestments; to understand that there is, in reality, very slight difference between human beings, and to approach those in authority with the sure knowledge that, no matter how lofty their position, they have, at best, but two arms and two legs, a fondness for mince pies, and a failing for colds in the nose. Governors quarrel with their wives, and have ingrowing toe nails. The forty-eight of them, heads of the several states of the Union, remind one of the main street in a boom town—two stories on the sidewalk, but a ramshackle shed in the rear....
No sooner did the dome of the Capitol appear through a break in the wheels than Carmel began to dress herself mentally for the meeting. She had a horrible fear she would become tongue-tied and thrust her thumb in her mouth like an embarrassed little girl who has forgotten her piece.... She glanced at her watch. It was five o’clock.
How late did Governors work at governing?... She directed her chauffeur to drive to the Capitol, and there she alighted because she had no idea what else to do. She climbed the imposing steps and entered the building. It was a repellent sort of place; a mausoleum of assassinated ambitions, and it chilled her. The corridors were all but deserted.
Leaning against a column adjacent to a brass cuspidor was an old man in a uniform which might have been that of a prison guard, a janitor, or a retired street car conductor. Carmel approached him.
“Where will I find the Governor?” she asked.
“Gawd knows,” said this official, and made a generous and accurate contribution to the receptacle.
“Who does know?” Carmel asked, impatiently.
“I hain’t here to locate governors. I show folks through the buildin’, and mostly they give me a quarter a head.”
“Well, show me to the Governor’s office and I’ll give you fifty cents a head,” Carmel said.
He peered at her, took a last, regretful look at the cuspidor and sighed. “’Tain’t wuth it,” he said, sententiously. “’Tain’t wuth fifty cents to see no Governor I ever knowed, and I’ve come through the terms of six.... Foller me.”