Eleanor Clearwater was visiting in the hill top part of Harrison—was visiting the Hollisters, where she could stop whenever she wished, and as long as she wished, without any one’s thinking of the matter. Helm—regarded with respect by the better class at Harrison, now that he was so high in public life—had arranged to receive the returns at Hollister’s. Bart Hollister, without a suspicion that Eleanor had “managed” him, invited Helm—and was as astonished as pleased by his prompt acceptance. So sweeping was the victory that his election was conceded by the Republicans before he finished supper at Mrs. Beaver’s.
“A governor gets eight thousand a year, doesn’t he?” said Miss Shaler, the sentimental, be-wigged old maid of the boarding-house circle. “You’ll certainly pick on some nice girl and be getting married now, Mr. Helm.”
“Governor Helm,” corrected Mrs. Beaver, proudly.
“Yes, I’m sure there’ll soon be a Mrs. Governor Helm,” said Miss Shaler, with the soft hysterical giggle with which she accompanied all her frequent remarks on the one subject that interested her.
Helm surprised them all—threw them into a ferment of curiosity—by saying with bold, emphatic, even noisy energy, unbelievable in so shy a man:
“Yes, indeed, ma’am. She and I’ll be inaugurated together.”
He laughed with a gayety that seemed a little foolish in a grave governor-elect. He gave them no chance to devise ways round the inflexible rule against direct questions as to that one subject. He rose and went forth to claim his bride.
V
SEEING HER FATHER
ON the second floor of the Washington house of George Clearwater, lumber king and United States Senator, there was a small room whose windows commanded the entrance. They gave upon one of those useless and never used balconies wherewith architects strive to conceal the feebleness of their imagination and the poverty of their invention. Of that particular balcony some facetious congressman said that Clearwater might one day find it convenient—“when he needs a place to stand and explain to the mob how he happens to be so rich.” The remark got round to Clearwater, and he never looked at the little balcony without recalling it. The multimillionaire, constantly enveloped by his crowd of sycophants, soon tends to become paranoiac, soon fancies that everybody is thinking about him all the time—about him and his money, which are one and the same thing, for he feels that he is his money and his money he. Also, as his dominant passion has always been wealth, he assumes that it is the universal passion raging in all hearts as firmly as in his; that therefore he must be the object of malignant envy; that those myriad eyes ever fixed upon him are as covetous as his own. Thus Clearwater took that facetious remark seriously—read the distorted tales of the French revolution, discussed the ferocity and restlessness of the masses quite as if he had never been a farm hand, one of those same masses, and had never known the truth about them—their ass-like patience, their worm-like meekness.
He was looking at this balcony and was thinking of the “menacing popular unrest” when George Helm’s name was brought up to him. He was still looking and thinking when Helm himself entered the small room. At the sound of his step, Clearwater turned and greeted him with friendly constraint. Helm looked wretched with embarrassment.