* * * * *
The two men walked down the street together, and the Senator, who had met Cairy at the Woodyards' a number of times and remembered him as an inmate of the house, fell to talking about the dead man.
"Poor chap!" he said meditatively; "he had fine talents."
"Yes," assented Cairy. "It was a shame!" His tone left it doubtful just what was a shame, but the Senator, assuming that it was Percy's untimely death, continued:—
"And yet Woodyard seemed to lack something to give practical effectiveness to his abilities. He did not have the power to 'seize that tide which leads men on to victory,'—to size up the situation comprehensively, you know." (The Senator was fond of quoting inaccurately and then paraphrasing from his own accumulated wisdom.)
"I doubt very much," he went on expansively, "if he would have counted for as much as he did—as he promised at one time to count at any rate—if it had not been for his wife. Mrs. Woodyard is a very remarkable woman!"
"Yes, she is a strong personality,—she was the stronger of the two undoubtedly."
"She has one of the ablest business heads that I know of," the Senator said emphatically, nodding his own head. "She should have been a man."
"One would miss a good deal—if she were a man," suggested Cairy.
"Her beauty,—yes, very striking. But she has the brain of a man."