“It was a funny way she was taken. If she was a married woman I should have said the cause was not the heat.”
“Huh?” said Cele, pulling herself in. “What’s that you mean?”
“I mean nothing,” said Mrs. Nesbitt. “Nothing at all. Only I would have you always be sure to make sure your friends are good girls, my darlin’. Mind ye, I say nothing against the young lady. But she’s a pretty and dangerous face and she’s away from her home where by rights should every girl be.”
CHAPTER XV
THE CONVENTION
I
THE Convention gathered. It was an event signal enough to make an impress even on the great city. Convention Week was recognized by every one, hotel men, shop keepers, railroad men, newspapers, pickpockets, police, students in the great universities at the city’s gates, and the great subordinate multitude which read the newspapers and accepted the ruling of politics or commerce, as to which days should be held apart—Labor Day, Mother’s Day, Convention Week.
The streets were hung with banners, great, swinging canvas pieces of propaganda, bearing crude likenesses of candidates and still cruder catchwords supposed to represent their opinions or those of their opinions likely to excite popular pleasure. In the hotel lobbies men swarmed. Desk clerks, sated with patronage, gave smiling and condescending negations to those who applied for rooms. The girls at the cigar counters and newspaper stands worked steadily, throwing back saucy rejoinders to the occasional impudences of the men.
It was mostly a gathering of men, a smoky, hot, sweating collection of men who had a certain kind of training in this game of conventions and politics. They flung themselves into their parts, gossiping, joking, occasionally forceful, immensely knowing. No one of them was there who did not feel himself a commissioned prophet—perhaps not as to ultimate but as to tendencies anyhow. They spoke the great names with a jesting respect, the lesser ones with camaraderie or a fillip of scorn—but for any suggestion of political idealists or of women they had a smile. They admitted the fact that women had been put in the show but it wasn’t going to change the show any. They knew.
Here and there in the hotels were groups of women, well dressed for the most part, some of them handsome, all of them more alert, less careless than the men—talking wisely too but with more imagination, with a kind of excited doubt as to the outcome, and despite themselves showing a delighted naïveté in their bearing towards the whole event. That was on the first day before the heat had really lowered over the city.
Helen and Margaret had been well provided for. They had long before engaged rooms in one of the most comfortable hotels where previous patronage made Helen able to choose her accommodations. Gage who had come after all, had no reservations anywhere and apparently no particular worry about them. He could always get in somewhere and he had no intention of staying at the same hotel with Helen and Margaret. He breakfasted with them on the train and enjoyed it in spite of himself, enjoyed being able to watch Helen and to bait Margaret with political pessimism and a jocular scorn as to the effect of women on the Convention. When they arrived he saw them to their hotel and left Helen to her “glory” he said, a little mockingly.