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 felt a pang at these tidings of her husband's tardiness, but she
put that away in the habit she had acquired, and said:
"Oh, I know--but these telegraph companies are so slow!"
She was happy all that evening, though she denied that her own relief
as to their position had aught to do with that happiness.
"He will be much more useful this term than he was before," she told
her father at supper. "Jerome always said, you know, that it took one
term for a congressman to learn the ropes at Washington."
Garwood reached home Sunday morning, and when he saw Emily waiting in
the doorway something like pity for her smote him, and out of the flush
of his new success he yearned toward her, so that, there in the old
darkened hallway where the tender scene had been enacted so many times
in other days, he folded her in his arms, and kissed her lips and her
brow and her hair, and called her once more "Sweetheart." And the happy
little woman purred in his embrace, and as she hid her face against his
breast, she said:
"My Jerome--my big Jerome!"
And it was all as it had been two years before. Only now, lifting her
eyes to his, her face reddened with a blush as she said:
"You must come up and tell baby--he is dying to hear all about it."
Emily vowed to Garwood that now the convention was over he must take
a rest, and he was content for days to loll at home. He slept late in
the morning and she bore his breakfast to him with his mail, or he
stretched himself on the divan in the parlor in the afternoon while she
read the newspapers to him until he would sink into slumber with the
assurance that the room would be darkened and the house hushed until he
chose to wake.
Pusey had nailed the party banner to his masthead as it were, and
Emily read to Garwood with a laugh that could not conceal her pride the
big types at the head of his editorial page:
"For Congress, Jerome B. Garwood."
There day after day it remained, and she read it over and over, finding
a certain joy in it. Pusey had printed a long editorial announcing his
determination to support Garwood, and explaining with the conviction
of the editorial page--where the argument is all one way, with no
chance for rejoinder--his own action in voting for the candidate he had
originally opposed.
"He isn't really consistent, is he, Jerome?" Emily said after she had
read the editorial aloud to her husband.
"Oh, well," he laughed, knocking the ashes from the cigarette he was
smoking, in a security he could find nowhere else in Grand Prairie, for
he did not wish the town to know that he smoked cigarettes, "you know
what Emerson says: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little
minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.'"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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