The Ramrodders: A Novel

by Holman Day

The more he drew from her the more he was drawn to her.

It was not the love that comes with a rush of the emotions and sweeps a man away.

Through the intellect, through his hunger for information and wider views, she was making herself indispensable to his welfare and his ambitions.

And yet Madeleine Presson was not trying to make this young man of the north country fall in love with her. Her interest in him was first of all based upon his winning earnestness and the elements of success that she divined in him, were they properly cultivated. She had studied men at the capital from childhood. The development of men in public life and service had been the one theme that she had heard most discussed. Her impulse of assistance had been directed toward this grandson of Thelismer Thornton.

But as the days went by, and opportunity gave them their hours together, they were drawn more closely, each insisting in secret meditation that it was not love. He found himself gradually rebuilding his creed of living on the foundation she had laid in that first long talk of theirs. He had arrived at such a point of belief in her that he was glad that she had opened his eyes. He was finding men—meeting them by the hundred—even as she had pictured them to him: selfish, scheming, crafty, and not understanding in the least his occasional attempts to meet them on the upper level of perfect candor. For her part, she found more in this young man than she had expected to find.

Harlan considered Herbert Linton the single jarring note in this new symphony of mutual interests.

Linton came to the capital with more or less regularity, and called on the Pressons with fully as much appearance of being entirely at home as his newer rival. When they were together the girl treated both with impartial interest and attention. She listened to each in turn, and if they chose to sit and scowl at each other she did the talking for all three. Deftly she arranged that they should leave together, and they always promptly separated as soon as they reached the sidewalk, as though they were afraid to trust themselves in each other's company.

So the new year came in, and the hordes of lawmakers, lobbyists, lookers-on, and laymen descended on the State capital.

The first few days of a legislative session, though packed full of politics and business, rush, and routine, are festival days, after all. There are the old friends to greet and the new friends to meet. There are ten spectators to every legislator, and the spectators are on hand for a good time. Outside of the factional clinches of the House and Senate caucuses the early days have little serious business.

Presson's great hotel and the lesser lights of the capital's houses of entertainment were packed to their roofs. The State House on the hill sent sparkling radiance at night from all its hundreds of windows out across the snow which loaded the broad lawns. Senator Pownal, renominated in joint caucus, spoke to crowded floor and galleries on the second evening. Harlan Thornton, in his seat in the House, listened and wondered if that convention had not been a dream.