"Well, Emmet," he said at last, "here I am, all ears. Perhaps it will help you to a beginning if I suggest that there's a woman somewhere at the bottom of the trouble."
The other placed his chair snugly in the corner, buried his hands deep in his pockets, and looked at the brasier with a fixed stare. "It's not one woman," he began, with a sensible effort, "it's two. I don't know any better way to give you an idea of the tangle I've gotten myself into than by going back to the beginning of the story. About five years ago, I hadn't any more idea of going into politics than you have now. I was playing baseball in the summer and running a car in winter, and saving my money. My parents were both dead, and I was thinking that it was pretty near time for me to get married. I was never one to throw away my money with the boys,—it came too hard,—I didn't even smoke or drink, and"—
"That's a bad beginning," Leigh interrupted, shaking his head with mock seriousness. "No small vices—women."
Emmet took the comment with good humour. "No, I was n't an easy mark for women, either. I tell you my main idea was to get ahead, to save some money. I could n't stand poverty; I had seen too much of it. When I was a boy, I carried the washing for my mother after school hours. In summer I played baseball and hung around the race-track. If I had n't been so heavy, I 'd have become a jockey and made my fortune quicker; but anyhow I had ten thousand dollars salted away by the time I was twenty-five. I 'm thirty now."
Leigh was secretly somewhat amused by this prologue, which seemed to spring partly from the egotism of a self-made man, partly from an instinctive unwillingness to embark upon the confession to which he was committed. However, he was far from being bored. "I'm about thirty myself," he remarked, "and I'm worth about thirty cents. But that's a digression."
"Well, as I was saying," Emmet resumed, "I wasn't an easy mark for women. I had too much at stake to get tangled up that way, but I was thinking that it was pretty near time for me to find a wife. There's a lady in this town—you 'll hardly believe it—I did n't myself, at first—that took a fancy to me. She was rich and fashionable, and all that, the sort of woman I would n't have thought of in any such way; but gradually I began to notice that she took my car nearly every day. Even when she told me straight out that she preferred to ride with me, I did n't suspect anything, for she always had a pleasant word for all the boys. But after a while I woke up to the fact that she knew just when I would be at the City Hall, and managed her shopping so as to ride home with me. After that I began to take particular notice. When I took her fare, I was embarrassed by the look in her eyes. She had fine eyes, and a way of sizing me up that seemed to mean something. Sometimes our hands would touch for a moment, and then it was n't by accident; and by Christmas time I knew as well as if she had told me that if she was n't in love with me, she thought she was."
"You were a lucky dog," Leigh said, filling an impressive pause with the first chance comment that came to him. Afterward he wondered at the obstinate torpidity of his mind, for not even the reference to her deliberate look and fine eyes gave him the clew. All this talk of early hardship and of street-cars had put the narrator for the time on another level from that he now occupied in the world, and made his past seem his present. The very confession, and the manner of it, belittled the confessor, and Leigh took his characterisation of his admirer as rich and fashionable with a grain of salt, making some allowance for the point of view, some for natural vanity and a desire to impress him.
"I did n't think I was so lucky," the mayor answered simply. "Of course I was pretty well set up, but I never thought it would amount to anything, and it was a dangerous game to play. I was n't sure how far I could go, or how far she wanted me to go, and besides, I had mighty little chance to see her alone. There was always somebody near, and I thought if I overstepped the mark she might be offended, or her father might get on to it and have me fired for impertinence."
His listener suddenly abandoned his semi-recumbent position for one of alert attention and ceased smoking, not yet fully aware of the reason for his dawning excitement, except that the last words had called up a vision of Bishop Wycliffe to his mind. He was in a state of suspended perception, trembling upon the brink of a discovery he was loath to make, waiting with painful tension for more light.
"So I did n't even meet her halfway," Emmet was saying. "She kept asking me questions about my life, until little by little she knew all about me. But the thing that interested her most was the fact that I belonged to a union, and that I had read a good deal of political economy. Well, at Christmas time I got a box of books without any clew as to the sender, but of course I knew who sent them. They were Plato and Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus and John Stuart Mill, and books of that kind. After that she began to talk to me, right before her friends or her father, of my studies. I read at the books, at first to please her and to have something to say about them, and then because I became interested. Her friends regarded me as one of her charities and began to patronise me, but all the time I knew she felt differently, though no one suspected it but ourselves.