Emily, with the knowledge of politics that politicians' wives acquire, had watched from day to day the development of the contest at Pekin. Jerome had not written at all, but Emily chose to consider his failure as an exercise of one of the privileges of matrimony to which lovers look forward as they labor over their love letters. But she added a second reason which betrayed the specious quality of the first, when she explained to her father that in these days of newspapers, letter writing had become a lost art, belonging to a lavender scented past like the embroidery of tapestries. She told her baby, as she rolled his round little body in her lap, that she was jealous of politics, and promised him that when the convention was over, his father would be--and here she gasped and dropped the pretense that the child could understand. She could not bear to voice, even to herself, the feeling that her husband was any less the lover that he once had been. She realized to the utmost his position, she had felt it in little sacrifices she had been compelled to make, and she knew of his utter dependence on reëlection. Here, too, was another fact that she could hardly face squarely and honestly. She clung to her old ideal of her husband as a statesman no less ardently than she clung to her old ideal of him as a lover, and she disliked to feel that he was in Congress merely as a means of livelihood. A vague discontent floated nebulously within her, but with all the adroitness of her mind she would not allow it to concrete. "When he comes home!" she cooed to the baby, "when he comes home!" By Saturday, the strain upon her nerves had increased, like all anxieties, in a ratio equal to the square of the distance from its moving cause. All day long she waited for news, hoping for the best, but fortifying herself by trying to believe that if the worst came, it might in the end be beneficial, because it must in time, at least, force them to some more secure temporal foundation, where they could not be disturbed by every whim of politics. She remembered that Jerome had often reminded her, though that was in moments of security and elation, that all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword. Her father himself suffered a sympathetic suspense and in the afternoon he journeyed down town to see if he could learn anything of what was going on at Pekin. Late in the day the _Citizen_ hung out a bulletin saying that Garwood had been nominated on the twelve hundred and sixty-first ballot, and he hastened home, with the importance of an idle old man, longing to be the first to announce to Emily the news. But she waved her telegram gaily at him from the veranda as he hurried up the walk, and cried: "He's won, father! He's won! He's just been nominated!" The old man, cheated of a herald's distinction, could not resist the impulse to say: "Why, he was nominated this morning!"