After all, it was very simple. The business of a consulate was child's play, and the usual phases in the life of a diplomat were to be requisitely met by the usages of gentility--a quality Burnett discovered was not too amply possessed by those political gentlemen who sat abroad in the posts of honor to represent the great republic. He thought that if he could get a post, however small, with plenary powers, he would be happy. But, alas! He had been away from home so long that he didn't even know whether his senator was dead or alive, and when he reached Washington, a month or so after the inauguration, he realized how small were his chances for preferment. The President and Secretary of State were besieged daily by powerful politicians, and one by one the posts coveted, even the smallest of them, were taken by frock-coated, soft-hatted, flowing-tied gentlemen, whom he had noticed lounging and chewing tobacco in the Willard Hotel lobby. It was apparently with such persons that power took preferment. His roseate dreams vanished. Ross Burnett was a mere State Department drudge again at twelve hundred a year! He told Crabb that he had spoken to the chief of the diplomatic bureau in despair. "Isn't there any way, Crowthers?" he had asked. "Can't a fellow ever get any higher?" "If he had a pull, he might--but a consular clerk----" The shake of Crowthers' head was eloquent. "Isn't there anything a fellow--even a consular clerk--could do to win promotion in this service?" he continued. Crowthers had looked at him quizzically. "Yes, there's one thing. If you could do that, you might ask the Secretary for anything you wanted." "And that----" "Get the text of the treaty between Germany and China from Baron Arnim." Crowthers had chuckled. Crabb chuckled, too. He thought it a very good joke. Baron Arnim had been the special envoy of Germany to China, accredited to the court of the Eastern potentate with the special mission of formulating a new and secret treaty between these monarchs. He was now returning home carrying a copy of this document in his baggage. Burnett had laughed. It _was_ a good joke. "You'd better send me out again," Burnett had said, hopelessly. "Anything from Arakan to Zanzibar will do for me." Crabb listened to the story with renewed marks of appreciation. "So you've been out and doing in the world, after all?" he said, languidly, "while we--_eheu jam satis!_--have glutted ourselves with the stale and unprofitable. How I envy you!" Burnett smoked silently. It was very easy to envy from the comfortable vantage ground of a hundred and fifty thousand a year. "Why, man, if you knew how sick of it all I am," sighed Crabb, "you'd thank your stars for the lucky dispensation that took you out of it. Rasselas was right. I've been pursuing the phantoms of hope for thirty years, and I'm still hopeless. There have been a few bright spots"--Crabb smiled at his cigar ash--"a very few, and far between." "Bored as ever, Crabb?"