From such anecdotes she pieced together her new Ditmar.  He spoke of a large world she had never seen, of New York and Washington and Chicago, where he intended to take her.  In the future he would never travel alone.  And he told her of his having been a delegate to the last National Republican Convention, explaining what a delegate was.  He gloried in her innocence, and it was pleasant to dazzle her with impressions of his cosmopolitanism.  In this, perhaps, he was not quite so successful as he imagined, but her eyes shone.  She had never even been in a sleeping car!  For her delectation he launched into an enthusiastic description of these vehicles, of palatial compartment cars, of limited, transcontinental trains, where one had a stenographer and a barber at one’s disposal.

“Neither of them would do me any good,” she complained.

“You could go to the manicure,” he said.

There had been in Ditmar’s life certain events which, in his anecdotal moods, were magnified into matters of climacteric importance; high, festal occasions on which it was sweet to reminisce, such as his visit as Delegate at Large to that Chicago Convention.  He had travelled on a special train stocked with cigars and White Seal champagne, in the company of senators and congressmen and ex-governors, state treasurers, collectors of the port, mill owners, and bankers to whom he referred, as the French say, in terms of their “little” names.  He dwelt on the magnificence of the huge hotel set on the borders of a lake like an inland sea, and related such portions of the festivities incidental to “the seeing of Chicago” as would bear repetition.  No women belonged to this realm; no women, at least, who were to be regarded as persons.  Ditmar did not mention them, but no doubt they existed, along with the cigars and the White Seal champagne, contributing to the amenities.  And the excursion, to Janet, took on the complexion of a sort of glorified picnic in the course of which, incidentally, a President of the United States had been chosen.  In her innocence she had believed the voters to perform this function.  Ditmar laughed.

“Do you suppose we’re going to let the mob run this country?” he inquired.  “Once in a while we can’t get away with it as we’d like, we have to take the best we can.”

Thus was brought home to her more and more clearly that what men strove and fought for were the joys of prominence, privilege, and power.  Everywhere, in the great world, they demanded and received consideration.  It was Ditmar’s boast that if nobody else could get a room in a crowded New York hotel, he could always obtain one.  And she was fain to concede —­she who had never known privilege—­a certain intoxicating quality to this eminence.  If you could get the power, and refused to take it, the more fool you!  A topsy-turvy world, in which the stupid toiled day by day, week by week, exhausting their energies and craving joy, while others adroitly carried