West rose from his seat and walked toward Briggs. His face betrayed that he was trying to hide a feeling of amusement. These spasms of virtue on the part of Briggs always gave him a pleasant feeling of superiority. “My dear fellow,” he said, laying his hand on Briggs’s shoulder, “you’ve been a brick through the whole business. Stand by me till the bill goes through. That’s all we expect. Only don’t try to be too ideal, you know,” he urged, gently. “Ideals are very pretty things, but they won’t work in practical politics. If the Government were run by ideals it wouldn’t last six months. Legislation’s a business, like everything else that brings in money, and the shrewdest men are going to get the biggest returns. Think of all the men we’ve known who’ve been sent home from Washington simply because they’ve been over-zealous! But I must hurry back to the drawing-room. I’m in the clutches of two newspaper women. I only broke away for a moment on a pretext. I’ll see you later in the evening.” Briggs watched West disappear. Then he sank on the wicker seat again. This interview was only one of many similar talks he had had with the lobbyist; but each new encounter had the result of heaping fresh humiliation on him. He had always disliked West. The first time that he met the fellow he had felt an instinctive mistrust of him. Now the dislike had become so bitter that he could hardly keep from showing it. Sometimes, indeed, he did not try to hide it, and it seemed as if West only pretended that he did not observe it; or as if, indeed, it only amused him. Briggs recalled, with helpless misery, the steps by which he had bound himself to one of those men who used their knowledge of the law to spread corruption in politics. He had come to Washington full of ambition and eager for reform, with an inspiring sense that he had been chosen to be a leader in a great work. Soon he discovered how small an influence he was able to exert. After a few months, however, his personal qualities, his faculty of putting himself on confidential terms with people, made friends for him even in the opposition party. The first time he spoke in the House, his remarks, faltering and vague, had made a poor impression. At that trying moment his ease and eloquence had left him. For several months he was too discouraged to try again. He found it easy, as many another man had done, to drift with the political tide. One day, however, he suddenly lost his self-consciousness in a debate on a pension bill in which he had been taking a deep interest. He threw himself into it with vehemence, making two speeches that were reproduced in part by nearly all the big papers in the country. Those speeches gave him a national reputation. The leaders in Congress took an interest in him; their wives discovered that Mrs. Briggs was worth knowing. He felt more pride in his wife’s success than in his own. He became dissatisfied with his hotel rooms