“Did you find out anything more?” she asked, without looking up from the tiny embroidery frame which was her leisure-filling companion at home or elsewhere.

“Not enough to hurt anything.  McVickar has fixed things to suit himself.  The boy’s law-office job is to be pretty largely nominal; a sort of go-as-you-please and do-as-you-like proposition on the side, with Ackerton to do all the sure-enough court work and legal drudgery.  Since Ackerton is a pretty clean fellow, and Evan stands up so straight that he leans over backward, this lay-out means that the bribing isn’t going to be done by the legal department in the coming campaign.”

“Is that all?”

“All but one little thing.  Evan’s job is to be more or less associated with the traffic department, and the word has been passed to Gantry and his crowd to see to it that the boy doesn’t get to know too much.”

“But they can’t keep him from finding out about the underground work!” protested the small one.

“If it’s an order from headquarters, they’re going to try mighty hard.  Evan wants to believe that everything is on the high moral plane, and when a man wants to believe a thing it isn’t so awfully hard to fool him.  It’ll be a winning card for them if they can send the boy out to talk convincingly about the cleanness of the company’s campaign.  That sort of talk, handed out as Evan can hand it, if he is convinced of the truth of what he is saying, will capture the honest voter every time.  I tell you, little woman, there’s a thing we politicians are constantly losing sight of:  that down at the bedrock bottom the American voter—­’the man in the street,’ as the newspapers call him—­is a fair man and an honest man.  Speaking broadly, you couldn’t buy him with a clear title to a quarter-section in Paradise.”

This little eulogy upon the American voter appeared to be wasted upon the small person in the wicker rocking-chair.  “We must get him back,” she remarked, referring, not to the American voter, but to the senator’s son.  “Have you thought of any plan?”

“No.”

She smiled up at him sweetly.  “You are like the good doctor who cannot prescribe for the members of his own family.  If he were anybody else’s son, you would know exactly what to do.”

“Perhaps I should.”

“I have a plan,” she went on quietly, bending again over her embroidery.  “He may have to take a regular course of treatment, and it may make him very ill; would you mind that?”

David Blount leaned back in his chair and regarded her through half-closed eyelids.  “You’re a wonder, little woman,” he said; and then:  “I don’t want to see the boy suffer any more than he has to.”

“Neither do I,” was the swift agreement.  Then, with no apparent relevance:  “What do you think of Miss Anners?”

The senator sat up at the question, with the slow smile wrinkling humorously at the corners of his eyes.