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“Young man, what do you want of me anyhow?”

“Well, you’re Senator Tillman, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir. I’m Senator Tillman.”

“Well, I’m a reporter from the Globe. I’ve been told to learn what conclusions your delegation has reached as to how it will vote.”

“You and your editor of the Globe be damned!” he replied irritably. “And I want you to quit following me wherever I go. Just now I’m going for my laundry, and I have some rights to privacy. The committee will decide when it’s good and ready, and it won’t tell the Globe or any other paper. Now you let me alone. Follow somebody else.”

I went back to the office the first evening at five-thirty and sat down to write, with the wild impression in my mind that I must describe the whole political situation not only in Chicago but in the nation. I had no notion that there was a supervising political man who, in conjunction with the managing editor and editor-in-chief, understood all about current political conditions.

“The political pot,” I began exuberantly, “was already beginning to seethe yesterday. About the lobbies and corridors of the various hotels hundreds upon hundreds of the vanguard of American Democracy—etc, etc.”