Handy drew a dark brow when he became a Senator, and made a point of trying to look ominous. He carried his chin tilted up at an angle of forty-five degrees, and spoke of the most obvious things with an air of mystery. He never admitted anything; his closest approach to committing himself on even so apparent a proposition as the sunrise, was that it had risen "ostensibly"; he became known to the reporters as "Old Ostensible." It was his habit to tiptoe around the Senate chamber whispering to other Senators, and then having sat down to rise suddenly as though some great impulse had come to him and hurry into the cloakroom. He inherited the chairmanship of the railroad committee, and all employees came to him for their railroad passes; so he was the god of the blue-bottle flies of politics that feed on legislatures, and buzz pompously about the capitol doing nothing, at three dollars a day. In that session Handy was for the "peepul." He patronised the State Shippers' Association, and told their committee that he would give them a better railroad bill than they were asking. His practice was to commit to memory a bill that he was about to introduce and then go into his committee-room, when it was full of loafers, and pretend to dictate it offhand to the stenographer, section by section without pausing. It was an impressive performance, and gained Handy the reputation of being brainy. But we at home who knew Handy were not impressed; and, in our office, we knew that he was the same Ab Handy who once did business with a marked deck; who cheated widows and orphans; who sold bogus bonds; who got on two sides of lawsuits, and whose note was never good at any bank unless backed by blackmail. When the session closed Abner Handy came home, a statesman with views on the tariff, and ostentatiously displayed his thousand-dollar bills. The Handys spent the summer in Atlantic City, and Abner came home wearing New York clothes of an exaggerated type, and though he never showed it in our town, they used to say that he put on a high hat when the train whistled for Topeka. Also we heard that the first time Mrs. Handy appeared at the political hotel in her New York regalia, adorned with spangles and beads and cords and tassels, the "ladies of the hotel" said that she was "fixed up like a Christmas tree"--a remark that we in the office coupled with Colonel Morrison's reflection when he spoke of Ab's "illustrated vests." At the meeting of the State Federation of Woman's Clubs, Mrs. Handy first flourished her lorgnette, and came home with her wedding ring made over on a pattern after the prevailing style. About this time she made her famous remark to "Aunt" Martha Merrifield that she didn't think it proper for a woman to go through her husband's money with too sensitive a nose; she said that men must work and women must weep, and that she for one would not make the work of her husband any harder by criticising it with her silly morals.