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Lifted Masks; stories by Susan Glaspell
page 129 of 226 (57%)
money to his conscience. They would say he went back on them only
when he was through with them. Oh, no, there would be no more
strength in it than in the average deathbed repentance. He would
at least step out with consistency.

He folded the contracts and put them back into the envelope. The
minute hand now pointed to seven minutes to twelve. Some one was
tapping at the door, and the secretary appeared to say they were
waiting for him upstairs. He replied that he would be there in a
minute, hoping that his voice did not sound as strange to the other
man as it had to himself.

Slowly he walked to the door leading into the corridor. This, then,
was indeed the end; this the final stepping down from office! After
years of what they called public service, he was leaving it all now
with a sense of defeat and humiliation. A lump was in the old man's
throat; his eyes were blurred. "But you, Frank Leyman," he whispered
passionately, turning as if for comfort to the other man, "it will
be different with you! They'll not get you--not you!"

It lifted him then as a great wave--this passionate exultation that
here was one man whom corruption could not claim as her own. Here
was one human soul not to be had for a price! There flitted before
him again a picture of that seventeen-year-old boy in the little red
schoolhouse, and close upon it came the picture of this other young
man against whom all powers of corruption had been turned in vain.
With the one it had been the emotional luxury of a sentiment, a
thing from life's actualities apart; with the other it was a force
that dominated all things else, a force over which circumstances and
design could not prevail. "I know all about it," he was saying. "I
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