The committee in question had originally been organized to protest against some abuses in the tax department; but since then, from election to election, it had been drifting from one subject to another, finding an occasional evidence of its worthwhileness in some newspaper comment and the frightened reformation of some minor political official who ended, usually, by taking refuge behind the skirts of some higher political power—­in the last reaches, Messrs. Butler, Mollenhauer, and Simpson.  Just now it was without important fuel or ammunition; and this assignment of Cowperwood, with its attendant crime, so far as the city treasury was concerned, threatened, as some politicians and bankers saw it, to give it just the club it was looking for.

However, the decisive conference took place between Cowperwood and the reigning political powers some five days after Cowperwood’s failure, at the home of Senator Simpson, which was located in Rittenhouse Square—­a region central for the older order of wealth in Philadelphia.  Simpson was a man of no little refinement artistically, of Quaker extraction, and of great wealth-breeding judgment which he used largely to satisfy his craving for political predominance.  He was most liberal where money would bring him a powerful or necessary political adherent.  He fairly showered offices—­commissionerships, trusteeships, judgeships, political nominations, and executive positions generally—­on those who did his bidding faithfully and without question.  Compared with Butler and Mollenhauer he was more powerful than either, for he represented the State and the nation.  When the political authorities who were trying to swing a national election were anxious to discover what the State of Pennsylvania would do, so far as the Republican party was concerned, it was to Senator Simpson that they appealed.  In the literal sense of the word, he knew.  The Senator had long since graduated from State to national politics, and was an interesting figure in the United States Senate at Washington, where his voice in all the conservative and moneyed councils of the nation was of great weight.

The house that he occupied, of Venetian design, and four stories in height, bore many architectural marks of distinction, such as the floriated window, the door with the semipointed arch, and medallions of colored marble set in the walls.  The Senator was a great admirer of Venice.  He had been there often, as he had to Athens and Rome, and had brought back many artistic objects representative of the civilizations and refinements of older days.  He was fond, for one thing, of the stern, sculptured heads of the Roman emperors, and the fragments of gods and goddesses which are the best testimony of the artistic aspirations of Greece.  In the entresol of this house was one of his finest treasures—­a carved and floriated base bearing a tapering monolith some four feet high, crowned by the head of a peculiarly goatish Pan, by the side of which were the problematic remains