New York - The Novel

in his chair again, and puffed on his cigar.
    “We have a girl by the name of O’Donnell who works here, Mary O’Donnell,” he remarked easily.
    “It’s a common name,” Sean answered.
    Master continued to puff on his cigar.
    “My sister,” Sean said finally. “But she doesn’t know I’m here. Doesn’t approve of me, in fact.”
    “I think we treat her well.”
    “You do.”
    “She said there was a fellow bothering her. My wife told him not to come round any more.”
    “He won’t be troubling her again.”
    “And you don’t want me to tell Mary I met her brother?”
    “I’d prefer not.” Sean’s gaze went round the richly appointed room. Master watched him.
    “You know,” Master said quietly, “you Tammany boys didn’t invent the game. My ancestors were doing this kind of thing even before Stuyvesant was here. I reckon it’s the way cities always have been. Always will be, I dare say.” He nodded contentedly. “New crowd. Same game.”
    “So one day my grandson might be sitting in a place like this?”
    “Maybe. You seem like a coming man.”
    “I’d like that,” Sean said frankly. Then he grinned. “Perhaps even my sister would approve of me then.” He paused. “You’ve treated me very well, sir. I shall remember it. Especially considering the great difference between us.”
    Master took a slow draw on his cigar, sighting the young man through half-closed eyes.
    “Not so different, O’Donnell,” he said softly, “just dealt a better hand.”

Lincoln
1860
    W HEN HETTY HAD asked him to accompany her, Frank had almost refused. And when he did decide to go, it wasn’t really to please her, but because he supposed he’d better take a look at this damn fellow Lincoln, since he’d turned up in New York.
    The first time Frank Master had heard of Abraham Lincoln was a couple of years earlier, when Lincoln had made a name for himself in Illinois running for the Senate against Douglas, the Democratic incumbent. When the two men had held a series of public debates, the newspapers had covered them extensively, and since the principal subject of the Lincoln-Douglas debates had been the slavery question, Master had read the accounts carefully. Though Lincoln hadn’t taken the seat, it was clear to Frank that the fellow was a skillful politician.
    After that, however, Frank hadn’t paid much attention to the Illinois lawyer until this month when, as the election year opened, the influential
Chicago Tribune
had suddenly, and rather surprisingly, endorsed him for the presidency. So despite the fact that he shared none of his wife’s enthusiasm, and it was a chilly, damp February evening, he nonetheless set out with her to the Cooper Institute’s Great Hall at Astor Place. Since the hall was only a dozen blocks away down Third Avenue, they decided to walk.
    As they left Gramercy Park, he offered his arm, and Hetty took it. Years ago the gesture would have been the most natural thing in the world. God knows, Frank thought, how many miles they had walked arm in arm backin the early days of their marriage, when she was still the young woman who’d come with him to the Croton Aqueduct. But they seldom walked arm in arm nowadays, and as he glanced at her he wondered, when exactly had the coolness between them begun?
    He supposed it all went back to when she’d read that infernal book.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
had been no help to his marriage, that was for sure. It was amazing to Frank that the issue of slavery could have come between him and his wife; yet perhaps, he considered, he shouldn’t be so surprised when it had managed to divide the whole country. Nor was it only the rights and wrongs of the slavery question, but the profound difference in philosophy that the argument had revealed—a difference about which, at the end of the day, he could do nothing.
    If Hetty believed that slavery was wrong, Frank didn’t disagree with her. But to his mind, it wasn’t as simple as that. “We have to deal with the world as it is, not as it should be,” he would gently point out.
    It wasn’t as if the issue was new. Washington and Jefferson, both slave owners, had recognized the inconsistency of slave-owning with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Both had hoped that slavery would slowly disappear, but they also realized how difficult that would be.
    A few summers ago, Frank and Hetty had gone up the Hudson to the resort of Saratoga. At the hotel, they had got to know a