He was sitting beside the rickety old table in a wooden chair, a kitchen chair. It was tilted back and Helm’s long lank legs were tangled up with each other and with the rungs in amazing twists. Perhaps you have happened to know an occasional man--or woman--whose every act and trick of manner had an inexplicable fascination. When George Helm was self-conscious, he had no more magnetism than is inseparable from intelligent, sympathetic good nature sunning in a kindly keen sense of humor. But the instant he lost self-consciousness--as he always did on the platform, and as he was more and more doing in private life, now that he had begun to have success--that instant he became a magnet, one of those human magnets who interest you, no matter what they do, and in repose. Even in bed--that too short, sagging bed in the attic of Mrs. Beaver’s boarding-house--even as he lay doubled up, there was the fascination of the unique, the perfectly natural and unassuming. As he sat twisted in and upon the wobbly kitchen chair, his friend, lazy Bill Desbrough, from across the hall, looked in every few minutes, hoping George would encourage him to enter. It was curious about George Helm, how in spite of his lack of what passes for dignity, no one ever--even in the days when he was thought to be a joke--“the boy with that beard”--no one ever ventured to interrupt him without an encouraging look from those deep-set blue-gray eyes. At last George looked up and smiled as Bill stood in the doorway. He said: “Come in, you loafer.” “How’s State Senator-elect Helm to-day?” inquired Bill, lounging in, his hands in his pockets, his pipe hanging from the corner of his mouth. “How does it feel to be famous?” “To be less obscure,” corrected George. He had a passion--and a genius--for accuracy. “To be famous,” insisted Desbrough. “Do you know who is State Senator for the district adjoining this--on either side?--or to the north or south?” Bill Desbrough’s laugh was confession. “There are fifty State Senators in this State alone,” continued George. “There are forty-eight States in the Union. Fifty times forty-eight----” “Why are you trying to make yourself out so small?” “Or--to look at it another way, I belong to the Democratic boss of Harrison--Pat Branagan, saloon-keeper. He belongs to the Republican boss, Al Reichman. Al belongs to Senator Harvey Sayler, the State boss. Sayler belongs to the big monopolistic combines that center in Wall Street. They belong to a dozen big plutocrats who belong to about three of their number. And those three belong to their money--do what it says, say and think what it tells ’em to.” “I hope you’re happy now,” said Bill. “You’ve made yourself out to be about equal to a patch on the ragged pant-leg of some cotton-picking coon working for the sub-lessee of a mortgaged farm in a poor corner of Arkansas.”