Page:Despotism and democracy; a study in Washington society and politics (IA despotismdemocra00seawiala).pdf/45

 *sor somewhat ostentatiously—at which his colleagues smiled and let him alone. Crane had just experienced an instance of Thorndyke's good will, who was in the act of saving his chairman from making a ridiculous blunder which would have hindered his prospects very much as Oliver Goldsmith's unlucky red coat did for him with the Bishop. The Secretary of State, a very long-headed person in a small way, had previously got the length of the Honourable Julian Crane's foot, as the vulgar express it. He had asked Crane to play golf with him; he had invited the member from Circleville to little dinners with him. The Secretary's wife had requested Crane as a great favour to assist her widowed daughter in chaperoning a party of débutantes and college youths to the theatre, and when a scurrilous journal had reflected grossly upon himself, a married man, and the young widow, Crane was in secret hugely flattered. To be linked, even remotely, in a scandal with the daughter of the Secretary of State was a social rise—although he happened to know that Cap'n Josh Slater, the father of the Secretary of State, had been engaged in steam-boating on the Ohio River in the wild for