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?"