As for Abner Handy, it would have made little difference to him then whether she or anyone else had tried to check his career; for he was cultivating a loud tone of voice and a regal sweep to his arms. He always signed himself on hotel registers Senator Handy, and the help about the Topeka hotels began to mark him for their hate, for he was insolent to those whom he regarded as his inferiors. But Colonel Morrison used to say that he wore his vest-buttons off crawling to those in authority. He took little notice of the town. He referred to us as "his people" in a fine feudal way, and went about town with his cigar pointing toward his hat brim and his eyes fixed on something in the next block. He became the attorney for a number of crooked promotion schemes, and the diamond rings on his wife's fingers crowded the second joint. He had telegraph and express franks, railway and Pullman passes in such quantities that it made his coat pocket bulge to carry them. Often he would spread out these evidences of his shame on his office table, to awe the local politicians, and in so far as they could influence the town opinion, they promulgated the idea that if Ab Handy was a scoundrel--and of course he was--he was a smart scoundrel. So he came to think this himself. [Illustration: Went about town with his cigar pointing toward his hat-brim] Mrs. Handy threw herself into the work of the City Federation with passionate zeal. Also she kept up her lodge connections, and explained to the women, whom she considered of a higher social caste than the lodge women, that she was "doing it to help Mr. Handy." She did a little church work for the same reason, but her soul was in the Federation, for it insured her social status as neither lodge nor church could do. So she put herself under the protecting seal-lined wing of Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington who on account of her efforts to clean the streets we at the office had been taught by Colonel Morrison to know as the Joan of the trash-cans. And Miss Larrabee, our society reporter, told us that Mrs. Handy was the only woman in town who did not smile into her handkerchief when Mrs. Worthington, who had trained down to one hundred and ninety-seven pounds five and three-eighths ounces, gave her course of lectures on delsarte before the Federation.