ed reform, they'd have to reform themselves first. I
admired his nerve, I must say."

"He always had that," I remarked. "How did they take it?"

"Well, they didn't like it much, but I think most of them had a respect
for him. I know I did. He has a whole lot of assurance, an air of
knowing what he's talking about, and apparently he doesn't give a
continental whether he's popular or not. Besides, Greenhalge had cracked
him up to the skies for the work he'd done for the school board."

"You talk as if he'd converted you," I said.

Ralph laughed as he rose and stretched himself.

"Oh, I'm only the intelligent spectator, you ought to know that by this
time, Hughie. But I thought it might interest you, since you'll have to
go on the stump and refute it all. That'll be a nice job. So long."

And he departed. Of course I knew that he had been baiting me, his scent
for the weaknesses of his friends being absolutely fiendish. I was angry
because he had succeeded,--because he knew he had succeeded. All the
morning uneasiness possessed me, and I found it difficult to concentrate
on the affairs I had in hand. I felt premonitions, which I tried in vain
to suppress, that the tide of the philosophy of power and might
were starting to ebb: I scented vague calamities ahead, calamities I
associated with Krebs; and when I went out to the Club for lunch
this sense of uneasiness, instead of being dissipated, was increased.
Dickinson was there, and Scherer, who had just got back from Europe; the
talk fell on the Citizens Union, which Scherer belittled with an air of
consequence and pompousness that struck me disagreeably, and with an
eye newly critical I detected in him a certain disintegration,
deterioration. Having dismissed the reformers, he began to tell of his
experiences abroad, referring in one way or another to the people of
consequence who had entertained him.

"Hugh," said Leonard Dickinson to me as we walked to the bank together,
"Scherer will never be any good any more. Too much prosperity. And he's
begun to have his nails manicured."

After I had left the bank president an uncanny fancy struck me that in
Adolf Scherer I had before me a concrete example of the effect of my
philosophy on the individual....

Nothing seemed to go right that spring, and yet nothing was absolutely
wrong. At times I became irritated, bewildered, out of tune, and unable
to understand why. The weather itself was uneasy, tepid, with long
spells