"You said it again, son," said Quinlan. "Six months ago he was a national nuisance and now he's a national menace; and who's responsible--or, rather, what's responsible--for him being a national menace? Well, I'm going to tell you; but first I'm going to tell you something about Mallard. I've known him for twelve years, more or less--ever since he came here to Washington in his long frock coat that didn't fit him and his big black slouch hat and his white string tie and in all the rest of the regalia of the counterfeit who's trying to fool people into believing he's part tribune and part peasant." "You wouldn't call Mallard a counterfeit, would you?--a man with the gifts he's got," broke in Drayton. "I've heard him called everything else nearly in the English language, but you're the first man that ever called him a counterfeit, to my knowledge!" "Counterfeit? why, he's as bogus as a pewter dime," said Quinlan. "I tell you I know the man. Because you don't know him he's got you fooled the same as he's got so many other people fooled. Because he looks like a steel engraving of Henry Clay you think he is a Henry Clay, I suppose--anyhow, a lot of other people do; but I'm telling you his resemblance to Henry Clay is all on the outside--it doesn't strike in any farther than the hair roots. He calls himself a self-made man. Well, he's not; he's self-assembled, that's all. He's made up of standardised and interchangeable parts. He's compounded of something borrowed from every political mountebank who's pulled that old bunk about being a friend of the great common people and gotten away with it during the last fifty years. He's not a real genius. He's a synthetic genius." "There are just two things about Mallard that are not spurious--two things that make up the real essence and tissue of him: One is his genius as a speaker and the other is his vanity; and the bigger of these, you take it from me, is his vanity. That's the thing he feeds on--vanity. It's the breath in his nostrils, it's the savour and the salt on his daily bread. He lives on publicity, on notoriety. And yet you, a newspaper man, sit here wondering how the newspapers could kill him, and never guessing the real answer." "Well, what is the answer then?" demanded Drayton.