The people pay me seventy-five hundred a year.
They take all my time.

They make it impossible for me to do anything outside.

They watch and suspect and grumble.

And I could be making my two hundred thousand a year or more." He was rattling on complacently, patting himself on the back, and, in his effort to pose as a marvel of patriotic self-sacrifice, carefully avoiding any suggestion that mere money seemed to him a very poor thing beside the honor of high office, the direction of great affairs, the flattering columns of newspaper praise and censure, the general agitation of eighty millions over him.

"Sometimes I'm almost tempted to drop politics," he went on, "and go in for the spoils.