"I've heard it often enough," answered the Senator gayly. "If I'd listened to them I'd be still in the ring."
Then a suspicion overcame him, and he cried out bitterly:
"Do you say the same, Artie?"
"Rot. There isn't another like you in the whole world, uncle. If my vote could do it you'd go into the White House to-morrow. If you're in earnest in this business of the nomination, then I'm with you to the last ditch. Now when you become mayor of the first city in the land"—Oh, the smile which flashed on the faces of Anne and the Senator at this phrase!—"you become also the target of every journal in the country, of every comic paper, of every cartoonist. All your little faults, your blunders, past and present, are magnified. They sing of you in the music-halls. Oh, there would be no end to it! Ridicule is worse than abuse. It would hurt your friends more than you. You could not escape it, and no one could answer it. Is the prize worth the pain?"
Then he looked out of the window to escape seeing the pain in his mother's face, and the bitterness in the Senator's. He did not illustrate his contention with examples, for with these the Senator and his friends were familiar. A light arose on the poor man's horizon. Looking timidly at Anne, after a moment's pause, he said:
"I never thought of all that. You've put me on the right track, Artie. I thank you."
"What can I do," he whispered to Anne, "since it's plain he wants me to give in—no, to avoid the comic papers?"
"Whatever he wishes must be done," she replied with a gesture of despair.
"The boy is a wonder," thought the Senator. "He has us all under that little California thumb."
"I was a fool to think of the nomination," he said aloud as Arthur turned from the window. "Of course there'd be no end to the ridicule. Didn't the chap on Harper's, when I was elected for the Senate, rig me out as a gladiator, without a stitch on me, actually, Artie, not a stitch—most indecent thing—and show old Cicero in the same picture looking at me like John Everard, with a sneer, and singing to himself: a senator! No, I couldn't stand it. I give up. I've got as high as my kind can go. But there's one thing, if I can't be mayor myself, I can say who's goin' to be."