She shook her head slowly.
"Don't you know that I'll prize it—and why?" said he in a low voice. "Give it to me."
Their eyes met; hers fluttered down; but she raised them suddenly and put the flower in his buttonhole, her face so close that he felt her breath on his cheek.
Beside him at supper, she took up the thread of their earlier talk.
"If you must give up your business, why shouldn't it be for something bigger than the college—public life for instance?"
"I may say," West answered her, "that as yet there has not been that sturdy demand from the public, that uproarious insistence from the honest voter ..."
"At dinner the other evening I met one of your fine old patriarchs, Colonel Cowles. He told us that the new Mayor of this city, if he was at all the right sort, would go from the City Hall to the Governorship. And do you know who represents his idea of the right sort of Mayor?"
West, picking at a bit of duck, said that he hadn't the least idea.
"So modest—so modest! He said that the city needed a young progressive man of the better class and the highest character, and that man was—you. No other, by your leave! The Mayoralty, the Governorship, the Senate waiting behind that, perhaps—who knows? Is it wise to bottle one's self up in the blind alley of the college?"
Thus Delilah: to which Samson replied that a modern college is by no means a blind alley; that from the presidential retreat he would keep a close eye upon the march of affairs, doubtless doing his share toward moulding public opinion through contributions to the Post and the reviews; that, in fact, public life had long had an appeal for him, and that if at any time a cry arose in the land for him to come forward ...