"Perhaps I would," he said. Then, suddenly: "How about Senator Norman? Do I defy him too?"
"Not at all," said Aunt Mary. "He also will go over to the people."
"Can you answer for him?"
"I think I can. He will be forced to do so in the same way you are. He too has been victimised."
She leaned forward and deposited her small cigar, of which she had really smoked very little, in the ash tray. Sitting erect, she folded her hands in her lap and became forthwith a woman again--a sedate, almost prim, elderly woman.
"That," she explained simply, "is the source of my interest in this matter. I like you, Mayor Black, because you have some of the courtliness of the old school in your manner. I should be sorry to see you in misfortune. But I care much more, naturally, for my brother, George Norman, and more still for the name of Norman"--from her tone she might have referred to the Deity,--"which has been an honourable name in this country for eight generations, and which George, with his spoils politics and his dissipations, is compromising. I have long wanted him to break with his present associates, to live straight, and to become a real leader, as the Normans were in New York State in the early years of the last century. I have tried again and again to get him to do so. Over and over he has promised me he would. But he is weak. He has never done it. Now he will have to do it!"
All the members of the little group looked with some admiration, I fancy, at Aunt Mary, sitting straight, an incarnation of aristocratic, elderly femininity, in her chair. Where a moment or two before she had been an unsexed modern, she looked now like an old family portrait.
Rockwell broke the momentary silence:
"Miss Norman has presented, so much better than I could have done, the argument which I tried to suggest to Mr. Black."
It was probably unfortunate that Rockwell had recalled attention to himself. The Mayor glanced at him with animosity, and at the silent Merriam, and over at Mollie June, listening eagerly in the background. Then at Aunt Mary again. He leaned back, pulling at his cigar, thinking hard.