The 13th District: A Story of a CandidateWhitlock, Brand
General
The 13th District: A Story of a Candidate
Whitlock, Brand
Didactic fiction; Elections -- Fiction; Political campaigns -- Fiction; Political fiction; Social problems -- Fiction
She had planned during the long year in which Garwood waited so
impatiently for the sitting of Congress to go to Washington with him.
They had talked of it all the winter and during the spring. When
March came and with its fourth day brought the sense that he was now
in reality a congressman, Garwood had felt an increase of importance
with an increase of impatience. The coming of his first voucher soon
after was a joy to them both, and the four hundred and sixteen dollars
and sixty-six cents it called for seemed to link them more firmly to
officialdom. But Garwood longed to be sitting in his seat in the House
of Representatives; to hear his name in the roll-call; he felt that he
would not realize it all until he had been there long enough to have
grown familiar, and yet not so long as to begin to dread the end. And
Emily felt that her joy would not be full until she had seen him there.
The whole time for her had held other duties, duties of a sacred
preparation, when she sat long days in the sunlight, with her eyelids
drooped over white garments in her lap. Garwood had never been so
tender of her before, and he hung about in a solicitude that betrayed a
man's love and a boy's awkwardness. With a woman's superior intuition
she was the dominant one in those days, though the coming of the
baby late in the fall left her helpless, and restored him suddenly
to self-confidence. So, after all, when December came, with its long
anticipated first Monday, Emily could not go to Washington with
her husband and, bruised by the wrench of their first parting, she
was left in the house with her father and her boy to face a long
winter alone. All that winter she carefully read the accounts in the
newspapers of the proceedings of Congress, and cast her eye each
morning down the wide columns of the _Congressional Record_ seeking the
magic name "Mr. Garwood."
It was only once or twice that she had the joy of finding Jerome's
name, and then what he said seemed formal and distant, and did not have
a personal appeal to her. For instance, late in the session, she read:
"Mr. Garwood addressed the Committee of the Whole."
And then in maddening parenthesis:
"(His remarks will appear later.)"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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