After it was written he would not for the world have called up Fitch to verify the central fact. He couldn’t risk it. He scheduled the broadside for the second morning following.... But there was Io! He had promised. Well, he was to meet her at a dinner party at the Forbes’s. She could see it then, if she hadn’t forgotten.... No; that, too, was a subterfuge hope. Io never forgot.
As if to assure the resumption of their debate, the talk of the Forbes dinner table turned to the mayoralty fight. Shrewd judges of events and tendencies were there; Thatcher Forbes, himself, not the least of them; it was the express opinion that Laird stood a very good chance of victory.
“Unless they can definitely pin the Wall Street label on him,” suggested some one.
“That might beat him; it’s the only thing that could,” another opined.
Hugging his withering phrase to his heart, Banneker felt a growing exultation.
“Nobody but The Patriot—” began Mrs. Forbes contemptuously, when she abruptly recalled who was at her table. “The newspapers are doing their worst, but I think they won’t make people believe much of it,” she amended.
“Is Laird really the Wall Street candidate?” inquired Esther Forbes.
Parley Welland, Io’s cousin, himself an amateur politician, answered her: “He is or he isn’t, according as you look at it. Masters and his crowd are mildly for him, because they haven’t any objection to a decent, straight city government, at present. Sometimes they have.”
“On that principle, Horace Vanney must have,” remarked Jim Maitland. “He’s fighting Laird, tooth and nail, and certainly he represents one phase of Wall Street activity.”
“My revered uncle,” drawled Herbert Cressey, “considers that the present administration is too tender of the working-man—or, rather, working-woman—when she strikes. Don’t let ’em strike; or, if they do strike, have the police bat ’em on the head.”