Presently he
found that she was still speaking, and he began to listen to her,
catching a phrase now and then through the deafening clamor of his
thoughts.
It amounted to this--that just after her husband's first election,
when Fleetwood's claims for the Attorney-Generalship were being
vainly pressed by a group of his political backers, Mrs. Mornway had
chanced to sit next to him once or twice at dinner. One day, on the
strength of these meetings, he had called and asked her frankly if
she would not help him with her husband. He had made a clean breast
of his past, but had said that, under a man like Mornway, he felt he
could wipe out his political sins and purify himself while he served
the party. She knew the party needed his brains, and she believed in
him--she was sure he would keep his word. She would have spoken in
his favor in any case--she would have used all her influence to
overcome her husband's prejudice--and it was by a mere accident
that, in the course of one of their talks, he happened to give her a
"tip" (his past connections were still useful for such purposes), a
"tip" which, in the first invading pressure of debt after Mornway's
election, she had not had the courage to refuse.
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