our knowledge and judgment and conduct that the normal well–educated man hasn’t. But where we are strong, we are stronger than they. Do you know anything about Thorndyke?” “I have heard my father speak of Mrs. Thorndyke, whose family he knew many years ago, and he visits occasionally at Senator Thorndyke’s. Mrs. Thorndyke sent me a request that I would call to see her, but—but—I don’t pay any visits now.” “It’s a shame you don’t—a woman like you. Mrs. Thorndyke is charming, but not so charming as you. And I lay claim to great nobility of soul when I praise Mrs. Thorndyke, or Thorndyke either, for that matter. Mrs. Thorndyke has no use for me or for anybody of my name, except my second daughter. And Thorndyke, although he isn’t leading the pack of hounds who are baying after me to get me out of the Senate, is quietly giving them the scent. Yet I swear I admire Thorndyke—or, rather, I admire his education and training, which have made him what he is. If I had had that training—a gentleman for my father, a lady for my mother, association with the sons of gentlemen and ladies, a university education, and then had married a lady—“ Clavering got up and took a turn about the narrow room. Finally he came and sat down in a chair closer to Elizabeth, and continued: “Thorndyke is one of the lawyers in the Senate who used to bother me. It seemed to me at first that every time I opened my mouth in the Senate chamber I butted into the Constitution of the United States. Either I was butting into the shalls or the shall nots, and Thorndyke always let me know it. I could get along from the first well enough in the rough–and–tumble of debate with men like Senator Crane, for example,—a handsome fellow, from the West, too, very showy in every way, but not the man that Thorndyke is. It was the scholarly men that I was a little afraid of, I’m not ashamed to say. I am a long way off from a fool; consequently I know my own limitations, and a want of scholarship is one of those limitations.”