It was to a woman that George was unbosoming his distress on this particular occasion, and, as has been already indicated, his indignation and disgust were entirely justified. Her name was Miss Mary Wellington, and she was the girl whom he wished with all his heart to marry. It was no hasty conclusion on his part. He knew her, as he might have said, like a book, from the first page to the last, for he had met her constantly at dances and dinners ever since she “came out” seven years before, and he was well aware that her physical charms were supplemented by a sympathetic, lively, and independent spirit. One mark of her independence--the least satisfactory to him--was that she had refused him a week before; or, more accurately speaking, the matter had been left in this way: she had rejected him for the time being in order to think his offer over. Meanwhile he had decided to go abroad for sixty days--a shrewd device on his part to cause her to miss him--and here he was come to pay his adieus, but bubbling over at the same time with what he called the latest piece of disregard for public decency on the part of the free-born voter. “Just think of it. The fellow impersonated one of his heelers, took the civil-service examination in the heeler’s name, and got the position for him. He was spotted, tried before a jury who found him guilty, and was sentenced to six months in jail. The day he was discharged, an admiring crowd of his constituents escorted him from prison with a brass band and tendered him a banquet. Yesterday he was chosen an alderman by the ballots of the people of this city. A self-convicted falsifier and cheat! A man who snaps his fingers in the face of the laws of the country! Isn’t that a commentary on the workings of universal suffrage?” This was a caustic summing up on George’s part of the story he had already told Miss Wellington piecemeal, and he looked at her as much as to ask if his dejection were not amply justified. “It’s a humiliating performance certainly,” she said. “I don’t wonder you are exercised about it. Are there no extenuating circumstances?” Miss Wellington appeared duly shocked; yet, being a woman of an alert and cheery disposition, she reached out instinctively for some palliative before accepting the affair in all its stark offensiveness. “None which count--none which should weigh for a moment with any one with patriotic impulses,” he answered. “The plea is that the people down there--Jim Daly’s constituents--have no sympathy with the civil-service examination for public office, and so they think it was rather smart of him than otherwise to get the better of the law. In other words, that it’s all right to break a law if one doesn’t happen to fancy it. A nation which nurses that point of view is certain to come to grief.” Mary nodded gravely. “It’s a dangerous creed--dangerous, and a little specious, too. And can nothing be done about it? About Daly, I mean?”