Sprague laughed in spite of himself. "In things political your artlessness is prehistoric," he said. "You belong in the Stone Age. All in all, you and Ross Shelby aren't far removed: he's politically immoral; you are politically unmoral." "We'll go and talk to Ruth Temple," decided the younger man, his eye lighting on the central figure of a group, chiefly masculine. "Who can look at her and maintain that the higher education of women is a mere factory for frumps?" "Ruth has a quaint rareness all her own," Sprague answered, watching the play of the girl's mobile face. "She had it as a mere tot. Is it her mouth, her simple dress, her hair?--One can't say precisely what." "Don't try. You're squinting at her like an entomologist over a favorite beetle. Take her for what she seems, and chuck analysis. She is decorative. She satisfies the optic nerve." "Which is intimately allied with other nerves, my bachelor." He counted the men around the sofa where the girl sat beside little Milicent Hilliard, and announced, "Seven; it's Queen Ruth always." "And, like a true monarch, bored to extinction by her courtiers. Behold Dr. Crandall browbeating the Rev. Mr. Hewett like a hanging judge. I'll warrant they're talking politics too. The atmosphere is drenched with it." Sprague bent his head to listen. "Wrong," he chuckled slyly. "It's literature this time, or what passes as such. They're threshing out the immortal ode on the 'Victory of Samothrace.'" Bernard Graves laughed, also, at some jest well understood, and moved to watch this eddy in the astonishingly widespread discussion of an anonymous poem, of a certain rhetorical vigor, which had been Interpreted by some critics as a plea for woman suffrage. At this juncture Mrs. Hilliard suddenly bore down upon them, flourishing a yellow paper. "Such news, such news!" she called. "Here's a telegram--a telegram from our candidate. He is nominated! Mr. Shelby is nominated. Think of it! One of our members! And he has wired the good news to us first of all!" She searched vainly for her glasses--her big blue eyes were astigmatic--and finally, with an impatient "You read it to them all," thrust the message into Volney Sprague's reluctant fingers. He unfolded and read the paper, in lively quandary whether her choice were as haphazard as it seemed:-- "Nominated on first ballot. Home ten-thirty. Coming directly to club. It stands first. "C. R. SHELBY." "Isn't that simply dear of him?" demanded Mrs. Hilliard. "_We_ come first. He remembers us in his hour of triumph. It shows the true nature of the man." "It does indeed," grumbled Sprague, shifting within pinching distance of Bernard Graves, whom he had seen grinning in the background during the reading. "It's a barefaced bid for votes." Mrs. Hilliard's enthusiasm demanded a vent.