Cargill poured the cream on his oatmeal before he replied: "But, dear sir, nothing is too good for a representative. Young man, you don't seem to know how to farm yourself out."
All day Saturday the Windom rotunda was crowded with men. The speakerships, the house offices, were being contested for here; the real battle was being fought here, and under Cargill's cynical comment the scene assumed great significance to Bradley's uninitiated eyes. They took seats on the balcony which ran around the "bear pit," as he called it. Around them, flitting to and fro, were dozens of bright, rather self-sufficient young women.
"This is one of the most dangerous and demoralizing features of each legislature," he said to Bradley. "These girls come down here from every part of the State to cajole and flatter their way into a State House office. You see them down there buttonholing every man they can get an introduction to, and some of them don't even wait for an introduction. They'd be after you if you were a Republican."
Bradley looked out upon it all with a growing shadow in his eyes. He suddenly saw terrible results of this unwomanly struggle for office. He saw back of it also the need for employment which really forced these girls into such a contest.
"They soon learn," Cargill was saying, "where their strength lies. The pretty ones and the bold ones succeed where the plain and timid ones fail. It has its abuses. Good God, how could it be otherwise! It's a part of our legislative rottenness. Legal labor pays so little, and vice and corruption pay so well. Now see those two girls button-holing that leprous old goat Bergheim! If it don't mean ruin to them both, it will be because they're as knowing as he is. Every year this thing goes on. What the friends and parents of these girls are thinking of, I'll be damned if I know."
Bradley was dumb with the horror of it all. He had such an instinctive reverence for women that this scene produced in him a profound, almost despairing sorrow. He sat there after Cargill left him, and gazed upon it all with stern eyes. There was no more tragical thing to him than the woman who could willingly allure men for pay. It made him shudder to see those bright, pretty girls go down among those men, whose hard, peculiar, savage stare he knew almost as well as a woman.
They did not know that he was a legislator, and he escaped their importunities; but he overheard several of them, as they came up with some member—sometimes a married man—and took seats on the balcony near him.
"But you had no business to promise Miss Jones! How could you when I was living?"
"Well, then, now you've seen me, you can tell Miss Jones your contract don't go," laughed the girl.