Thus the five minutes were lengthened out to ten, and then with apologies to a quarter of an hour. Shelby's eyes dropped to the newspapers on his knee and fastened on a headline—
"SHELBY AND THE DEMIJOHN."
It required a second reading. The absorbing present had for the moment sponged the morning's happenings from his thoughts. To remember explained without cheapening the sensation. He was used to a relative prominence in the rural press, but neither this nor the talk with the reporters had prepared him for inch-high capitals on the first page of a metropolitan newspaper. What New Yorkers thought of this particular newspaper was a detail.
SHELBY AND THE DEMIJOHN.
A Sidelight on the Storm Centre of
the Most Picturesque Political
Fight in the Empire State.
The Opponent of the Author of the Ode on the
Victory of Samothrace talks of his Rival
for Congressional Honors and his Book.
MR. SHELBY'S VIGOROUS VIEWS ON THE ISSUES OF THE CAMPAIGN.
There followed a well-spiced "story" in which Shelby, with his diction chastened and his colloquialisms omitted save where they lent a racy strength, was made to say the things the reporter concluded he ought to have said—it was a party organ—and to sparkle after a fashion which is actually attained by few in the presence of the interviewer. Even at his weakest he was caused to shine. A kindly platitude he had let fall anent Graves's book astonished him as he met it again; the merest crust upon the waters, under the reporter's manipulation, it returned to him a filling loaf:—
"But," said Mr. Shelby, "is the production of literature, however delightful, the fittest school for official life? This, I conceive, is the whole issue between me and this gifted youth whose illness I deplore."
It would have been well had he stopped here; but he turned to the other papers. There was no repetition of the first page glory, his eulogist's contemporaries entertaining other ideas of space; but he found his name in most of them.