was really engaging his whole mind.  It was this discovery that had set her to disregarding his seeming of colossal, of fatuous egotism, and had started her toward an estimate of him wholly different from the current estimate.  Now, was he thinking of their future, or was it some other matter that occupied his real mind while he talked on and on, usually of himself?  She could not tell; she hoped it was, but she dared not try to find out.

They were at their mail, which one of the guides had just brought.  He interrupted his reading to burst out:  “How they do tempt a man!  Now, there’s”—­and he struck the open letter in his hand with a flourishing, egotistic gesture—­“an offer from the General Steel Company.  They want me as their chief counsel at fifty thousand a year and the privilege of doing other work that doesn’t conflict.”

Fifty thousand a year!  Margaret discreetly veiled her glistening eyes.

“It’s the fourth offer of the same sort,” he went on, “since we’ve been up here—­since it was given out that I’d be Attorney-General as soon as old Stillwater retires.  The people pay me seventy-five hundred a year.  They take all my time.  They make it impossible for me to do anything outside.  They watch and suspect and grumble.  And I could be making my two hundred thousand a year or more.”

He was rattling on complacently, patting himself on the back, and, in his effort to pose as a marvel of patriotic self-sacrifice, carefully avoiding any suggestion that mere money seemed to him a very poor thing beside the honor of high office, the direction of great affairs, the flattering columns of newspaper praise and censure, the general agitation of eighty millions over him.  “Sometimes I’m almost tempted to drop politics,” he went on, “and go in for the spoils.  What do you think?”

She was taken completely off guard.  She hadn’t the faintest notion that this was his way of getting at her real mind.  But she was too feminine to walk straight into the trap.  “I don’t know,” said she, with well-simulated indifference, as if her mind were more than half on her own letter.  “I haven’t given the matter any thought.”  Carelessly:  “Where would we live if you accepted this offer?”

“New York, of course.  You prefer Washington, don’t you?”

“No, I believe I’d like New York better.  I’ve a great many friends there.  While there isn’t such a variety of people, the really nice New Yorkers are the most attractive people in America.  And one can live so well in New York.”

“I’d sink into a forgotten obscurity,” pursued the crafty Joshua.  “I’d be nothing but a corporation lawyer, a well-paid fetch-and-carry for the rich thieves that huddle together there.”

“Oh, you’d be famous wherever you are, I’m sure,” replied she with judicious enthusiasm.  “Besides, you’d have fame with the real people.”

His head reared significantly.  But, to draw her on, he said:  “That’s true.  That’s true,” as if reflecting favorably.