stop to
wonder whether it is Victor Dorn or the changed times?"

The old man looked up abruptly and sharply--the expression of a shrewd
man when he catches a hint of a new idea that sounds as if it might
have something in it.

"You blame Victor Dorn," she went on to explain. "But if there were no
Victor Dorn, wouldn't you be having just the same trouble? Aren't men
of affairs having them everywhere--in Europe as well as on this
side--nowadays?"

The old man rubbed his brow--his nose--his chin--pulled at the tufts of
hair in his ears--fumbled with his cuffs. All of these gestures
indicated interest and attention.

"Isn't the real truth not Victor Dorn or Victor Dorns but a changed and
changing world?" pursued the girl. "And if that's so, haven't you
either got to adopt new methods or fall back? That's the way it looks
to me--and we women have got intuitions if we haven't got sense."

"_I_ never said women hadn't got sense," replied the old man. "I've
sometimes said MEN ain't got no sense, but not women. Not to go no
further, the women make the men work for 'em--don't they? THAT'S a
pretty good quality of sense, _I_ guess."

But she knew he was busily thinking all the time about what she had
said. So she did not hesitate to go on: "Instead of helping Victor
Dorn by giving him things to talk about, it seems to me I'd USE him,
father."

"Can't do anything with him. He's crazy," declared Hastings.

"I don't believe it," replied Jane. "I don't believe he's crazy. And
I don't believe you can't manage him. A man like that--a man as clever
as he is--doesn't belong with a lot of ignorant tenement-house people.
He's out of place. And when anything or anybody is out of place, they
can be put in their right place. Isn't that sense?"

The old man shook his head--not in negation, but in uncertainty.

"These men are always edging you on against Victor Dorn--what's the
matter with them?" pursued Jane. "_I_ saw, when Davy Hull talked about
him. They're envious and jealous of him, father. They're afraid he'll
distance them. And they don't want you to realize what a useful man he
could be--how he could help you if you helped him--made friends with
him--roused the right kind of ambition in him."

"When a man's ambitious," observed Hastings, out of the fullness of his
own personal experience, "it means he's got something inside him,
teasing and nagging at him--something that won't let him rest, but
keeps pushi