I wonder, or is it the will o' the wisp light that lights erring feet
to darkness?

She thought more highly of the Senator that he did not offer to shake
hands, just as most of us would think more highly of Judas Iscariot if
he had not kissed Christ. Being a Westerner, she had the Westerner's
horror of a maverick sporting the brand of a thoroughbred. The Senator
took off his glasses and sat tapping them above the U. S. Geological
Survey map.

"I trust," he began, "that my man expressed to you my deep regret--my
deep distress over--"

"Don't . . . please, don't," interrupted Eleanor, with a passionate
break in her voice. "I know you are honest, Senator Moyese, honest to
what you believe is right; and I don't want you to feel that you have
to lie because I am a woman."

The Senator opened his mouth, took a breath, and shut it again.

She understood him well enough to know that if he had to toy with his
glasses for a twelve month, he would wait for her to play down first.
Yet she recognized the instinct of his manhood to rescue the confusion
of her embarrassment when he put forward his hand casually and
said--"See my roses, Miss Eleanor? They are a new variety of American
Beauties. See, each petal has a white veining? Know how those roses
are produced? Ages and ages of poor trash worthless common roses have
been sacrificed to produce this perfect type."

"That's your theory of life, isn't it?" she asked, vaguely conscious
that the dragon was disarming her anger.

"Isn't it nature's?" asked Moyese gently. "The fit survive because
they are fit; the exceptional; the few; while the worthless go to
waste?"

Before Eleanor realized, she had lost all consciousness of self and was
pleading passionately leaning forward across the desk.

"Isn't Christ's theory better, Senator, to make all the unfit into fit?
Isn't Christ's theory the theory of science? Science aims to make a
whole field of perfect corn; not just one perfect cob. I know that;
for I read it in your speech at the opening of the Agricultural
College. If we keep on sacrificing the interests of the many to the
interests of the few, aren't we working back to savagery, Senator?"

The Senator drew the finest of the roses from the jar. "It's a matter
of taste, perhaps, Miss Eleanor; but I prefer this to a whole jarful of
scrubs."

"Then you are not working for democracy. It's just as Mrs. Williams
says, all you foreign multimillionaires are subver