On the second floor of the Washington house of George Clearwater, lumber king and United States Senator, there was a small room whose windows commanded the entrance. They gave upon one of those useless and never used balconies wherewith architects strive to conceal the feebleness of their imagination and the poverty of their invention. Of that particular balcony some facetious congressman said that Clearwater might one day find it convenient--“when he needs a place to stand and explain to the mob how he happens to be so rich.” The remark got round to Clearwater, and he never looked at the little balcony without recalling it. The multimillionaire, constantly enveloped by his crowd of sycophants, soon tends to become paranoiac, soon fancies that everybody is thinking about him all the time--about him and his money, which are one and the same thing, for he feels that he is his money and his money he. Also, as his dominant passion has always been wealth, he assumes that it is the universal passion raging in all hearts as firmly as in his; that therefore he must be the object of malignant envy; that those myriad eyes ever fixed upon him are as covetous as his own. Thus Clearwater took that facetious remark seriously--read the distorted tales of the French revolution, discussed the ferocity and restlessness of the masses quite as if he had never been a farm hand, one of those same masses, and had never known the truth about them--their ass-like patience, their worm-like meekness. He was looking at this balcony and was thinking of the “menacing popular unrest” when George Helm’s name was brought up to him. He was still looking and thinking when Helm himself entered the small room. At the sound of his step, Clearwater turned and greeted him with friendly constraint. Helm looked wretched with embarrassment. “Ah--Mr. Helm--pardon me, Governor Helm,” said Clearwater who had long since effaced all traces of the farm hand and of the stages intermediate to his arrival at the American business man’s heaven, the plutocracy. “Much has happened since we met last winter.” Much had indeed happened, but the only blessed thing of it Helm could remember at the moment was the collar he had been beguiled into buying that morning. It was too high for him, and it squeaked. Also, Helm had on a new suit of clothes; he had bought it only a few days before. He had not yet got used to it, but it looked as if he had slept in it. That was the way clothes always acted with George--and being elected governor had made no change. In answer to the senator’s amiable remark he managed to utter--with a violent squeak and creak of the collar--a timid “Yes.” “It is no small honor to be the youngest governor in the United States,” pursued Clearwater. “Won’t you sit down?”