"Yes," he returned. "A wife can do so much for a man in politics if she is the right wife. I should be very glad if you would marry me," Rames resumed. "I think that we should get along together very well, and together we might do important things." "Be important things," Cynthia corrected. Harry Rames smiled. "That's an old quarrel of ours, Cynthia. I mean 'do' this time." Cynthia looked at him quickly. She was in the mood to find in that hope the strongest of appeals. "You really think so?" "I do. I should owe so very much to you. I should be conscious of my debt. I should try with all my strength to pay it back." Cynthia gave him her face frankly now. A smile of confidence quite lit it up. "I have no doubt of that," she said; and then the smile faded, and there came a look of longing. "But I would rather, of course, that it were work for love of me, than work to repay me. There's a difference, isn't there? But I suppose one can't have everything, and--perhaps--I might be content to help you on." She fell again to a wistful silence, pursuing the vision of a happiness which might have been down an avenue of bright imagined years. The happiness did exist. She had seen the evidences of it often enough. All men were not _tant soit peu cochons_, as she had once heard an unhappy French lady describe them, nor were all women neurotic. She had heard of lovers who felt that they had been waiting for one another since the beginning of the world. But it seemed that such happiness was for others, not for her. "Tell me!" she said. "When you were making your speech, after the agitation had passed and when you were master of yourself, you looked up to the ladies' gallery, you said, and noticed the women behind the grille?" "Yes." "Well--it is a little difficult to ask the question--But"--she stopped for a moment or two, and then went on with an appealing timidity, while the color once more mounted into her face--"but I suppose that then--when you knew you were making a success--it never came into your mind that you would have liked to have got me up there in the gallery while you were speaking?" The temptation to lie was strong upon Harry Rames now. The very timidity of her appeal moved him. It taught him that the truth would hurt her much more than he had ever dreamed. He hesitated. For the first time in her company he was at a loss. "The truth, please," she pleaded earnestly. "You said that your mind was free, that you could stand outside yourself and look on at what you were doing, as artists do. It never once occurred to you that you wanted me up there in the ladies' gallery, too, at the moment of your success, to witness it--to--yes, to share it with you?" The word was out at last--the word which she had been striving with her modesty to reach. "Be frank, please," she prayed.