ipe out my old score and show you
a perfectly clean slate with a nice scrollwork round it. Can't do it,
Lydia. I sha'n't come in for any of the prizes. I've got to be a very
ordinary, insignificant person from now on."

That hurt her and it did no good. She didn't believe him.

Not many days from this Jeff started out talking to men. He frankly
wanted something and asked for it. Addington, he told them, if they
built more factories and put in big industries, as they were trying to
do, was going to call in more and more foreign workmen. It was going to
be a melting-pot of small size. That was a current catchword. Jeff used
it as glibly as the women of the clubs. The pot was going to seethe and
bubble over and some demagogue--he did not mention Weedie--was going to
stir it, and the Addington of our fathers would be lost. The business
men looked at him with the slow smile of the sane for the fanatic and
answered from the fatuous optimism of the man who expects the world to
last at least his time. Some of them said something about "this great
country", as if it were chartered by the Almighty to stand the assaults
of other races, and when he reminded them that Addington was not trying
to amalgamate its aliens with its own ideals, and was giving them over
instead to Weedon Moore, they laughed at him.

"What's Weedon Moore?" one man said. "A dirty little shyster. Let him
talk. He can't do any harm."

"Do you know what he's telling them?" Jeff inquired.

They supposed they did. He was probably asking them to vote for him.

"Not a bit of it," said Jeff. "He'll do that later. He's telling them
they hold the key of the treasury and they've only to turn it to be
inside. He's giving no credit to brains and leadership and tradition and
law and punishment for keeping the world moving. He's telling the man
with the hod and the man with the pickaxe that simply by virtue of the
hod and the pickaxe the world is his: not a fraction of it, mind you,
but the earth. To kick into space, if he likes. And kick Addington with
it."

They smoothed him down after one fashion or another, and put their feet
up and offered him a cigar and wanted to hear all about his prison
experiences, but hardly liked to ask, and so he went away in a queer
coma of disappointment. They had not turned him out, but they didn't
know what he was talking about. Every man of them was trying either to
save the dollar he had or to make another dollar to keep it warm. J