It was mostly a gathering of men, a smoky, hot, sweating collection of men who had a certain kind of training in this game of conventions and politics. They flung themselves into their parts, gossiping, joking, occasionally forceful, immensely knowing. No one of them was there who did not feel himself a commissioned prophet--perhaps not as to ultimate but as to tendencies anyhow. They spoke the great names with a jesting respect, the lesser ones with camaraderie or a fillip of scorn--but for any suggestion of political idealists or of women they had a smile. They admitted the fact that women had been put in the show but it wasn’t going to change the show any. They knew. Here and there in the hotels were groups of women, well dressed for the most part, some of them handsome, all of them more alert, less careless than the men--talking wisely too but with more imagination, with a kind of excited doubt as to the outcome, and despite themselves showing a delighted naïveté in their bearing towards the whole event. That was on the first day before the heat had really lowered over the city. Helen and Margaret had been well provided for. They had long before engaged rooms in one of the most comfortable hotels where previous patronage made Helen able to choose her accommodations. Gage who had come after all, had no reservations anywhere and apparently no particular worry about them. He could always get in somewhere and he had no intention of staying at the same hotel with Helen and Margaret. He breakfasted with them on the train and enjoyed it in spite of himself, enjoyed being able to watch Helen and to bait Margaret with political pessimism and a jocular scorn as to the effect of women on the Convention. When they arrived he saw them to their hotel and left Helen to her “glory” he said, a little mockingly. “It’s hot,” he said. “Don’t try to make over the whole Party to-day, my dear.” “I won’t,” said Helen. Her eyes met his. For thirty-six hours every glance, every gesture towards him had been unreal, mechanically controlled. She was not apparently angry--nor cold. It was rather as if when she spoke to him she had no feeling. Deep in himself, Gage was frightened. He guessed the fact that anger is often a denial of loss of illusion and that in Helen’s utter lack of response there was something deadly, ominous. A glimmer of respect for her work came as he first saw her, the morning after their catastrophic night, not moping or storming, but studying notes for her seconding speech. But the glimmer faded. It was because she really didn’t care. Shallow feelings, easy to suppress, he told himself. She had probably told Margaret about the whole thing and Margaret had tipped her off as to how to behave. That thought struck him and made him curdle with anger again.