Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/131

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THOMAS WALES WARREN


seem sufficient to locate. He had never dissected Pritchard, and it is scarcely worth while to do it here; but to that well-dressed and good-looking young "secretarial valet" the offer of a place with the rich and "classy" "Wardrobe" Miller would be a flattery and a temptation hard to withstand.


9

As soon as Miller's letter arrived Warren telephoned to Pritchard, put the letter in the outer office, and returned to his work. Having absorbed the report on the direct primary, he was engaged in drawing up alternative bills to be introduced at the next Legislature, if the popular demand for a direct primary became too clamorous. One of the bills provided for a direct primary with a convention that should preserve to the party machines the control of nominations. The other was a direct primary bill that would surely be declared unconstitutional by the courts because it contained no provision to prevent Republicans from voting in a Democratic primary, or vice versa. He was making drafts of these two bills in his small, neat handwriting—to file them for future use—when he heard Pritchard in the outer office.

He listened.

Pritchard evidently read the letter over several times. Then he brought it in hesitatingly. "Here's a funny thing," he said, giving it to Warren.

The Attorney-General glanced through it. "Well,

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