He hated Mr. Benjamin Doolittle's colloquialisms, though once he had declared them amusing, racy, of the soil, and had rebuked Genevieve's fastidious criticisms of them on an occasion when she had interpreted her role of helpmeet to include that of hostess to Mr. and Mrs. Doolittle--oh, not in her own home, of course!--at luncheon, at the Country Club! "Well, I guess that's about all for today." Mr. Doolittle brought the conference to a close, hoisting himself by links from his chair. "It takes $3000 every time you circularize the constituency, you know----" He lounged toward the window and looked out again upon the pleasant, mellow scene around Fountain Square. And with the look his affectation of bucolic calm dropped from him. He turned abruptly. "What's that going on at McMonigal's corner?" he demanded sharply. "I don't know, I am sure," said George, with indifference, still bent upon teaching his manager that he was a free and independent citizen, in leading strings to no man. "It's been vacant since the fire in March, when Petrosini's fish market and Miss Letterblair's hat st----" He had reached the window himself by this time, and the sentence was destined to remain forever unfinished. From the low, old-fashioned brick building on the northeast corner of Fountain Square, whose boarded eyes had stared blindly across toward the glittering orbs of its towering neighbor, the Jaffry Building, for six months, a series of great placards flared. Planks had been removed from the windows, plate glass restored, and behind it he read in damnable irritation: "SOME QUESTIONS FOR CANDIDATE REMINGTON." A foot high, an inch broad, black as Erebus, the letters shouted at him against an orange background. Every window of the second story contained a placard. On the first story, in the show window where Petrosini had been wont to ravish epicurean eyes by shad and red snapper, perch and trout, cunningly imbedded in ice blocks upon a marble slab--in that window, framed now in the hated orange and black, stood a woman. She was turning backward, for the benefit of onlookers who pressed close to the glass, the leaves of a mammoth pad resting upon an easel. From their point of vantage in the second story of the Jaffry Building, the candidate and his manager could see that each sheet bore that horrid headline: "QUESTIONS FOR CANDIDATE REMINGTON." The whole population of White water, it seemed to George, was crowded about that corner. "I'll be back in a minute," said Benjie Doolittle, disappearing through the private office door with the black tails of his coat achieving a true horizontal behind him. As statesman and as undertaker, Mr. Doolittle never swerved from the garment which keeps green the memory of the late Prince Consort.