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
the wine Jerome still urged upon her.
As she looked at all those great men, and looked at Jerome, thinking
how much more handsome he was than they, she projected her thought to
the time when he would be a senator from Illinois and they would appear
together in the Senate restaurant, in their turn to be pointed out.
The pleasing sense of distinction was already with her, because of
the company they were in, though Emily had speedily learned that most
congressmen in Washington go about unnoticed, and that not all of the
senators are known by sight.
"Not until the cartoonists take them up," Jerome had explained to her.
"You'll go splendidly in a cartoon!" she said, enthusiastically.
"Would I?" he rejoined. "Well, that's hardly a compliment. You know,
the cartoons are all hateful, outrageously hateful--at least, the good
ones. Those that praise are always absurd and flat."
As they were finishing their luncheon, three men came in and took a
table across the room. When Garwood saw them he bowed, and some signal
evidently passed between them, for Garwood excused himself for an
instant from his wife, and went over to join them, leaning over their
table to whisper for a moment. When he came back he said:
"Em, I'm awfully sorry, but I find I shall be detained here at the
Capitol for about half an hour. We have a meeting of a subcommittee I'm
on. I'm awfully sorry," he added as he saw her face fall, "but if you
can go back to the hotel--I'll put you on the car--I'll join you there
at two."
He led her down the hall past the Senate post-office, then out to New
Jersey Avenue, where he put her on the car that took her back to the
lonesome little hotel.
It was long past midnight when he rejoined her there.
XX
Emily sat at her window, across which the rain slanted dismally into
the street below. Jerome lay in bed sleeping still, though it was now
nearly noon. He slept hard after his labors on the subcommittee, and
she had sent the nurse with the baby to patrol the long hallway, in
order that the child might not awaken his father, and she had gone
about herself noiselessly, to the same end. She had tried to read, but
could not. She had fancied a long letter to Dade Emerson, describing
her Washington trip, but the enthusiasm she had imagined for this
letter, the first in a long while in which she had anything to relate
that would compare with the letters Dade was able to write, colored as
they were with the picturesqueness of Old World travel, could not that
morning ring true.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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