"I have been in your library a great many times and I do not recall a
copy of the Congressional Record. You have said often that you despise
the newspapers and only read the telegrams; that the only paper you
read through is the London _Times_. So, I repeat, what do you know
about the American politics of to-day?"

"What I have told you."

"Where did you learn it? Do you ever go to the Senate or the House?"

"God forbid! But I am a man, and those things are in the atmosphere; a
man's brain accumulates naturally all widely diffused impressions.
I've been a great deal in the smoking-cars of railroad-trains, and
spent two years in a Western State where a man who had taken a fortune
out of a mine made no bones of buying a seat in the Senate from the
Legislature, nor the Legislature about selling it. It was the most
abominable transaction I ever came close to, and had as much to
do with my leaving the place as anything else."

"And you mean to say that you judge all the old States of the country
by a newly settled community of adventurers out West?"

"New York and Pennsylvania are notorious."

"There are bad boys in every school. What I want to know is--can you
assert on your knowledge that all the Southern and New England States
are corrupt and send only small politicians to Washington? This is a
more serious charge than Molly's assertion that they all use
toothpicks."