ruminated, strolling toward his office. "Suppose I must seem like a regular Judas to them. Isn't it the devil that they can't see it? Good fellows, they are—darned good fellows. Lord, but they've been nice to me. It's going to be hard—harder than I thought." He braced himself in his swivel chair and waited for the appeals of the "other boys."
Edmunds, president of the transportation interest, was first of the cabinet to come, entering full of solicitude, as for a friend. He warned, coaxed, cajoled. He made it clear that Henry owed him several debts of gratitude and wanted to know if his idea of reciprocation was to betray them all over a worthless Siwash?
Then came others. Each pleader succeeded in making Henry feel that somehow he was under obligation to him; and not one of them was able to see that the attorney's proposal to defend Adam John was anything but a rash, reckless, inconsiderate sort of sabotage upon a sacred fabric of friendships.
"This is going to be fierce," the young man muttered to himself, "fierce." Every favor he had ever given or received, every nod or smile he had ever exchanged, seemed to be remembered against him now, made the ground of an appeal to bend him from a moral purpose. He saw himself bound with ropes of velyet, but none the less ropes; shackled with the chains of a golden association, but none the less chains. "It's a regular third degree," he groaned, sweating distress at every pore. "If they would only get mad!" he stewed. "But this damned buttonholing, teary-eyed stuff! It's fierce—that's what it is, fierce!"
Two days this sort of thing kept up; two nights reproachful faces were round him in his sleep and voices
