"Because I shouldn't be able to realize a single one of your ideals. I know what they are—what you will expect in a wife. I could make you a rich man, a successful man, as the world measures success, and perhaps I could even give you love: after the first flush of youth is past, the heavenly-affinity sentiment loses its hold and a woman comes to know that if she cares to try hard enough she can love any man who will be thoughtful and gentle, and whose habits of life are not hopelessly at war with her own. But that kind of love doesn't breed love. Your vanity would pique itself for a little while, and then you would know the curse of unsought love and murder me in your heart a thousand times a day. No, David, I have read you to little purpose if these are the things you will ask of the woman who takes your name and becomes the mother of your children." She had risen and was standing beside his chair, with her hand lightly touching his shoulder. "Will you go now? There are others coming, and—"
He made his adieux gravely and went away half dazed and a prey to many emotions, but strangely light-hearted withal: and as once before, he walked when he might have ridden. But the mixed-emotion mood was not immortal. At the Clarendon he found a committee of Civic Leaguers waiting to ask him if he would stand as a "Good Government" candidate in the special election to fill the House vacancy in the capital district; and in the discussion of ways and means, and the setting of political pins which followed there was little food for sentiment.
It was three weeks and more after Governor Marston's call summoning the Assembly for an investigative session. Kent had fought his way triumphantly through the special election to a seat in the House, aided and abetted manfully by Ormsby, Hildreth, and the entire Trans-Western influence and vote. And now men were beginning to say that without the tireless blows of the keen-witted, sharp-tongued young corporation lawyer, the junto might still have reasserted itself.
But the House committee, of which Kent was the youngest member and the chairman, had proved incorruptible, and the day of the Gaston wolf-pack was over. Hendricks resigned, to escape a worse thing; Meigs came over to the majority with a show of heartiness that made Kent doubly watchful of him; heads fell to the right and left, until at the last there was left only one member of the original cabal to reckon with; the judicial tool of the capitol ring.
Kent had hesitated when MacFarlane's name came up; and the judge never knew that he owed his escape from the inquisitorial House committee, and his permission to resign on the plea of broken health, to a young woman whom he had never seen.
It was Elinor Brentwood who was his intercessor; and the occasion was the last day of the third week of the extra session—a Saturday afternoon and a legislative recess when Kent had borrowed Ormsby's auto-car, and had driven Elinor and Penelope out to Pentland Place to look at a house he was thinking of buying. For with means to indulge it, Kent's Gaston-bred mania for plunging in real estate had returned upon him with all the acuteness of a half-satisfied passion.
They had gone all over the house and grounds with the caretaker, and when there was nothing more to see, Penelope had prevailed on the woman to open the Venetians in the music-room. There was a grand piano in the place of honor, presided over by a mechanical piano-player; and Penelope went into ecstasies of mockery.
"Wait till I can find the music scrolls, and I'll hypnotize you," she said gleefully; and Kent and Elinor beat a hasty retreat to the wide entrance hall.
"I don't quite understand it," was Elinor's comment, when they had put distance between themselves and Penelope's joyous grinding-out of a Wagner scroll. "It looks as if the owners had just walked out at a moment's notice."
"They did," said Kent. "They went to Europe, I believe. And by the way; I think I have a souvenir here somewhere. Will you go up to the first landing of the stair and point your finger at that window?"