of "Assistant Secretary of the Treasury" upon their townsman, the whole
village awoke to the fact that all its greatness had not gone when
Senator Sprague was gathered to his fathers.

The event was potent as the cross Constantine saw, or dreamed he saw, in
the sky, in the conversion of party workers to the new Administration.
Everybody looked forward to an eminent future for the potent partisan
and millionaire, the first of that--now not uncommon--hierarchy that
replace the feudal barons in modern social forces. Had he listened to
the eager urging of Kate, his daughter and prime minister, Boone would
have accepted the foreign mission; but he stubbornly refused to listen
to her in this.

Kate Boone was like her father only in strong will, vehement purpose,
and a certain humorous independence that made her a great delight among
even the anti-Boone partisans in both Acredale and Warchester. Since the
death of her mother, Kate had been head of her father's household--an
imperious, capricious, kind-hearted tyrant, who ruled mostly by jokes
and persuasions of the gentler sort. It was her father's one lament that
Kate was not "the boy of the family, for she had more of the stuff that
makes the man in her little finger than Wes had in his whole body." She
kept him in a perpetual unrest of delight and dismay. She espoused none
of his piques or prejudices; she was as apt to bring people he disliked
to his dinner-table as those he liked. She was forever making him
forgive wrongs, or what he fancied to be wrongs, and causing him seem at
fault in all his squabbles, so that he was often heard to say, when
things went as he didn't want them:

"I don't know whether I am to blame or the other fellow until Kate hears
the story."