At home Jem took out the picture of Marcia Ames and studied it. Tiny though it was, it was instinct with her very poise and spiritual effluence. As so often with herself, he felt the something unsaid behind the serene self-possession of the face; the something vital for which he must grope. What was the message, the demand which the face was making upon him, which she was making upon him through this dear memento? Ranging back, he recalled in a flash that first impression of her in the meeting, while she was still so completely unknown that he had mistaken even the fundamental matter of sex; the impression of an untouched, untainted valorousness. Again he saw it, reflected from the tiny delicacy of the picture. Plain enough now what she demanded of him.
It was courage.
CHAPTER X
THE Senate proceedings did not open until ten o’clock. Meantime Montrose Clark, President of the Fenchester Public Utilities Corporation, and in some part godling of local affairs, had telephoned his commands to The Record that a representative be sent to his office that morning to take a statement for the paper. Jeremy, incautiously dropping in at the office early, got the job to do before going to the Capitol. He was admitted to an outer office by the hand-perfected private secretary, cross-questioned briefly, and passed in to the Presence.
Mr. Montrose Clark was telephoning. He was revealed to Jeremy’s inquiring eye as a plump, glossy, red-faced little man with a fussily assured manner, an autocratic voice and a keen and greedy eye. Few indeed were the local pies of promise or flavor in which Mr. Clark did not have a pudgy and profit-taking finger; and his bearing suggested the man comfortably sure of taking care of himself. He snapped “G’-bye” into the telephone and turned to Jeremy.
“You’re the rippawtah from The Record?”
The accent of the word stirred Jeremy’s bile. He did not know that it was merely a sub-conscious stock trick of Mr. Clark’s; that there were certain words, such as “rippawtah,” “culchah,” “legislaychuh,” and the like, whereby he asserted his superiority of intellectual status, reverting to the comfortable speech of the Middle West for the communication of other thoughts.
“I’m from The Record,” he said.