s own
voice. "I will trust human reason. I'm not afraid of you--I mean you
can't harm me by giving me new thoughts, and that's what you've done
ever since that day I heard you first at the picnic. You've helped me
to get where I am."

"I have?" she asked, in surprise. His eyes fell before hers. "It will
be strange if I have helped any one to political success."

Bradley was silent. How could he tell her what she had become to him?
How could he tell her that she was woven into the innermost mesh of his
intellectual fibre.

"You've taught me to think," he said, at last. "You gave me my first
ambition to do something."

"I am very glad," she replied, simply. "Sometimes I get discouraged. I
speak and people applaud, and I go away, and that seems to be all there
is to it. I never hear a word afterwards; but once in a while, some one
comes to me or writes to me, as you have done, and that gives me
courage to go on; otherwise I'd think people came to hear me simply to
be amused."

She was looking straight into the fire; and the light, streaming up
along her dress, transfigured her into something alien and
unapproachable. The easy flex of her untrammelled waist was
magnificent. She had the effect of a statue, draped and flooded with
color.

Cargill's penetrating voice cut through that sacred pause like the rasp
of a saw file. He had been listening to his companion till he was full
of rebellion. He was a bad listener.

"But what is success? Why, my dear young woman"--

"Don't patronize us, please," Ida interposed. "I speak for poor Miss
Cassiday, because she's too timid to rebel. Nothing angers me more than
that tone. Call us comrades or friends, but don't say 'My dear young
woman!'" She was smiling, but she was more than half in sober earnest.

Cargill bowed low, and proceeded with scowling brow and eyes
half-closed and fixed obliquely upon Ida. "Dear comrades in
life-battle, what is success? You remember the two lords in Lilliput
who could leap the pack thread half its width higher?"

"Don't drag Swift into our discussion," Ida cried. "Mr. Cargill's a
sort of American Swift," turning to Bradley. "Don't let him spoil your
splendid optimism. There is a kind of pessimism which is really
optimism; that is to say, people who believe the imperfect and unjust
can be improved upon. They are called pessimists because they dare to
tell the truth about the present; but the pessimism of Mr. Cargill, I'm
afraid, is the pessim