"The club has responded nobly," she confided in a stage whisper across the intervening millinery. "That eccentric Volney Sprague is positively the only recreant. And isn't the audience representative?" She beamed impartially round upon the just and the unjust through her jewelled lorgnon. Mrs. Hilliard rejoiced in her lorgnon. It compensated fully for her defect of vision, and lent her a distinction which she felt to be wholly cosmopolitan. She aspired to be cosmopolitan. The New Babylon Brass Band fell lustily upon a popular two-step at this moment, and an usher thrust a bundle of campaign leaflets into Graves's hands. One of these pamphlets contained a half-tone portrait of Shelby, with an account of his career and a few phrases from the more noteworthy of his public addresses. Graves gave these latter a caustic scrutiny, and read aloud one of the italicized quotations. "'It has been said, that Egypt is the gift of the Nile; Tuscarora County is no less the gift of the Erie Canal!' Now what can you say of a man who couples those two ideas with a sober face? He is aesthetically dead." "At least, he's enthusiastic," smiled Ruth, "which is refreshing nowadays. The canal is his master hobby, the poetry of his prosaic existence. Mr. Shelby is nothing if not practical." "Offensively practical." "Practicality achieves." Graves thought he detected an implication levelled at himself, and laughingly accused her. Ruth made no denial. "The world weighs achievement," she returned, "not barren cleverness." Outwardly serene, the young man was inwardly ruffled. It was no new thing for her to reproach him with napkined talents, and he was wont to count it as an earnest of her liking. The novelty of this situation lay in her presenting Shelby as a pattern of fruitfulness, and it irked him. The agile leap of the brass band from the half-finished two-step to "Hail to the Chief," suddenly put this out of mind, and he watched the speakers of the evening file up the judge's staircase to the rostrum. With the subsidence of the musicians the Hon. Seneca Bowers aligned himself with the water-pitcher. "How much he looks like Grant!" exclaimed Mrs. Hilliard, with originality.