I stood before him and looked down at him. "Your suspicion that I have also a personal reason is well-founded, James," said I. "I wouldn't put myself in a position where I should have to ask as a favor what I now get as a right. If I help you to the presidency, I must be master of the national machine of the party, able to use it with all its power and against _any one_--" here I looked him straight in the eye--"who shall try to build himself up at my expense. Personally, we are friends, and it has been a pleasure to me to help elevate a man I liked. But there is no friendship in affairs, except where friendship and interest point the same way. It is strange that a man of your experience should expect friendship from me at a time when you are showing that you haven't for me even the friendship of enlightened self-interest." "Your practice is better than your theory, Harvey," said he, putting on an injured, forgiving look and using his chest tones. "A better friend never lived than you, and I know no other man who gets the absolute loyalty you get." He looked at me earnestly. "What has changed you?" he asked. "Why are you so bitter and so--so unlike your even-tempered self?" I waved his question aside,--I had no mind to show him my uncovered coffin with its tenant who only slept, or to expose to him the feelings which the erect and fearless figure of Scarborough had set to stirring in me. "I'm careful to choose my friends from among those who can serve me and whom I can therefore serve," I said. "And that is the sentimentalism of the wise. I wish us to remain friends--therefore, I must be able to be as useful to you as you can be useful to me." "Goodrich shall go," was the upshot of his thinking. "I'll telephone him this afternoon. Is my old friend satisfied?" "You have done what was best for yourself," said I, with wholly good-humored raillery. And we shook hands, and I went. I was glad to be alone where I could give way to my weariness and disgust; for I had lost all the joy of the combat. The arena of ambition had now become to me a ring where men are devoured by the beast-in-man after hideous battles. I turned from it, heart-sick. "If only I had less intelligence, less insight," I thought, "so that I could cheat myself as Burbank cheats himself. Or, if I had the relentlessness or the supreme egotism, or whatever it is, that enables great men to trample without a qualm, to destroy without pity, to enjoy without remorse." XXI AN INTERLUDE My nerves began to feel as if some one were gently sliding his fingers along their bared length--not a pain, but as fear-inspiring as the sound of the stealthy creep of the assassin moving up behind to strike a sudden and mortal blow. I dismissed business and politics and went cruising on the lakes with restful, non-political Fred Sandys.