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PARTISAN REVIEW
seemed so very peculiar and again a curious unsteadiness in her
eyes. Mrs. Morton's character could not be separated from her
opinions and that was the basis of the rectitude that had captivated
the Mayor. Her notions did not appear to be a choice of alternatives
but a fate, like place of birth, age, and parents, irrevocable endow–
ments that came along with the other mysteries in conception. She had
small feet which only forty dollar shoes fit comfortably and in the
same way she was stuck with her opinions: concern for minority
rights, a just wage, immediate government ownership of natural re–
sources, equality with one's servants, another interview with Stalin,
opposition to the Taft-Hartley Act. And she had truly loved only
one man, President Roosevelt. It was Mrs. Morton who had first
thought of Johnson for Mayor, which in itself was odd
becau~e
she
had objected to his building his small house so close to hers; the
modesty of it humbled her and, furthermore, she did not
like
the
triangles, broken front, slanting roof, and neat, built-on garage that
ravished the Mayor's wife. Perhaps it was the Mayor's reading
lamp that had softened her heart. Week after week she watched him
and saw that he had few joys outside books and when he walked to
town in the morning swinging his old briefcase, she decided she
liked the "looks of the man." It would not be true to say they became
good friends. The Mayor felt uneasy, not grand and pure and true
enough for Mrs. Morton's trust. He feared making a misstep. Her
intransigence humiliated him at the same time that it made Mrs.
Morton his heart's heroine.
With a feeling of painful drama he glanced across the way and
saw the light in her study. What is the extraordinary lady doing
now? he wondered. His pictured her again, as he had once seen
her, in a fine old gray satin gown decorated on the sleeves and
collar with a fabulous tapestry of seed pearls; she was marking and
studying her copy of
The New York Times,
which the mailman
grumbled about day after day. Her pathos wounded the Mayor; every
exercise of her faculties filled him with wonder, appeared a marvelous
charitable exertion because she was wealthy, old and a woman. She
who might have done nothing beyond gathering a few flowers and
giving large dinner parties kept up an enormous civic correspondence
and organized
all
sorts of liberal programs to which she was never
elected president. Exiled and punished in the Mayor'S tender imagi-
