"God forbid! But I am a man, and those things are in the atmosphere; a man's brain accumulates naturally all widely diffused impressions. I've been a great deal in the smoking-cars of railroad-trains, and spent two years in a Western State where a man who had taken a fortune out of a mine made no bones of buying a seat in the Senate from the Legislature, nor the Legislature about selling it. It was the most abominable transaction I ever came close to, and had as much to do with my leaving the place as anything else." "And you mean to say that you judge all the old States of the country by a newly settled community of adventurers out West?" "New York and Pennsylvania are notorious." "There are bad boys in every school. What I want to know is--can you assert on your knowledge that all the Southern and New England States are corrupt and send only small politicians to Washington? This is a more serious charge than Molly's assertion that they all use toothpicks." "I repeat that I do not believe there is an honest man in that Capitol." "Do you know this? Have you investigated the life of every man in the Senate and the House?" "What a good district attorney you would make!" "You are talking a lot of copybook platitudes with which you have allowed your mind to stagnate. But you must convince me, for if what you say is true I shall have nothing to do with politics. Let us begin with Senator North. How and when did he buy his seat, and what Trust does he represent?" "Oh, I never have heard anything against North. He is too big a gun in Washington--" "You will admit then that _he_ is not corrupt--" "I don't doubt he has his own methods--" "I don't care three cents about your suppositions. I want facts. How about Senator Maxwell?" "He has been in Congress since before I was born. One never hears him discussed." "And his Puritanical State has heaped every honour on him that it can think of. Tell me the biography of Senator Ward--all that is too awful to be printed in the Congressional Directory--"