The deadlock in the legislature continued, in spite of all the efforts of the Church authorities to break it. Our political workers, summoned one by one by messengers from Church headquarters, had gone to interviews from which they did not return to us—until I had left only Judge Ed. F. Colborn (a famous character in Kansas, Colorado and Utah), and an old friend, Jesse W. Fox. One night, about a week after the meeting in the theatre, we three were sitting alone in my rooms, when the door opened and someone beckoned to Fox. He went out. Judge Colborn opened a window to see Fox getting into a carriage with a man from Church headquarters—and we knew that our last worker was gone.
He returned only to tell me that President Snow wished to see me—that if I were willing, the President would like to have me call upon him, at half past nine the following evening, in his residence. And I understood the significance of such an invitation for such an hour. I had been too often in contact with the power of the Prophets to doubt what was required of me. I was curious merely to know what form the ultimatum would take.
President Snow was then living with his youngest wife in a house a few blocks from the offices of the Presidency. I drove there in a carriage and ordered the driver to wait for me. President Snow opened the door to me himself, received me with his usual engaging smile, and ushered me into a reception room that was shut off, by portieres, from a larger parlor. There, when he had invited me to be seated, he said, winningly: "I was not sure you would come in answer to my message."
I assured him that I had not so far lost my regard for the men with whom my father was associated. "And besides," I said, "if there were no other reason, it is my place, as the younger of the two, to attend on your convenience."
"I did not know," he replied, "but that you thought me one of the 'Pharisees' of whom you spoke."
I did not accept this invitation to reply that I did not consider him one of the Pharisees. I explained merely that I had identified the Pharisees in my speech by name and deed and accusation. "Unless something there said is applicable to you, I have no charge to make against you."
He excused himself a moment to go to an infant whom we could hear crying in an inner room; and, when he returned, he had the child in his arms—a little girl, in a night gown. He sat down, petting her, stroking her hair with his supple lean hand, affectionately, and smiling with a sort of absentminded tenderness as he took up the conversation again.
This memory of him sticks in my mind as one of the most extraordinary pictures of my experience. I knew that I had come there to hear my own or some other person's political death sentence. I knew that he would not have invited me at such an hour, with such secrecy, unless the issue of our conference was to be something dark and fatal. And in the soft radiance of the lamp he sat smiling—fragile of build, almost spiritual, white-haired, delicately cultured—soothing the child who played with his long silvery beard and blinked sleepily. He inquired whether my carriage was waiting for me, and I replied that it was. He asked me to dismiss it. When I returned to the room, the little girl was resting quiet, and he excused himself to take her to her cot. I heard him closing the doors behind him as he came back. "We may now talk with perfect freedom," he announced. "There's no one else in this part of the house."
He sat down in his chair, composing himself with an air that might have distinguished one of the ancient kings. "I have sent for you to talk about the Senatorial situation. May I speak plainly to you?"
I replied that he might. He was watching me, under his gray eyebrows, with his soft eyes, in which there was a glitter of blackness but none of the rheum of old age.