Through some means he had to get on. His restless apprehension had grown. Her departure for Europe with her mother fed the rumours that from time to time had connected her name with eligible men. It was even hinted now that her mother's eyesight, which reached to social greatness across the Atlantic, was responsible for her celibacy. "There'll be an announcement before she comes back," the gossip ran. "They'll land a museum piece of a title." George didn't know about that, but he did realize that unless he could progress, one day a rumour would take body. He resented bitterly her absence this summer, but if things would carry on until the fall he would manage, he promised himself, to get ahead with Sylvia. Wandel seemed to enjoy having George near, for, irresolute as he was, he spent practically the entire summer in town. George, one night when they had returned from two hours' suffering of a summer show, asked him the reason. They smoked in Wandel's library. "I can look around better here," was all Wandel would say. "But Driggs! Those precious talents!" Wandel stretched himself in an easy chair. "What would you suggest, great man?" George laughed. "Do you write poetry in secret--the big, wicked, and suffering city, seen from a tenth-story window overlooking a pretty park?" Vehemently Wandel shook his head. "You know what most of our modern American jinglers are up to--talking socialism or anarchy to get themselves talked about. If only they wouldn't apply such insincere and half-digested theories to their art! It's a little like modern popular music--criminal intervals and measures against all the rules. But crime, you see, is invariably arresting. My apologies to the fox-trot geniuses. They pretend to be nothing more than clever mutilators; but the jinglers! They are great reformers. Bah! They remind me of a naughty child who proudly displays the picture he has torn into grotesque pieces, saying: 'Come quick, mother, and see what smart little Aleck has done.' You'll have to try again, George." George glanced up. His face was serious. "Don't laugh at me. I mean it. Politics." "At Princeton I wasn't bad at that," Wandel admitted, smiling reminiscently. "But politics mixes a man with an unlovely crowd--uncouth provincials, a lot of them, and some who are to all purposes foreigners. Do you know, my dear George, that ability to read and write is essential to occupying a seat in the United States Senate? I was amazed the other day to hear it was so. You see how simple it is to misjudge." "Then there's room," George laughed, "for more honest, well-educated, well-bred Americans." "Seems to me," Wandel drawled, "that a little broad-minded practicality in our politics would be more useful than bovine honesty. I could furnish that. How should I begin?" "You might get a start in the State Department," George suggested, "diplomacy, a secretaryship----"