ghtening
of the lips, warned him that he was about to go too far, that he had
sowed as much seed as it was wise to sow at that time. He dropped the
subject abruptly, saying: "But I've got to go up to the bank before train
time. I'm glad we've had this little talk. Something of value may grow
out of it. Think it over, and if any new ideas come to you run up to
Chicago and see me."

Arthur did indeed think it over, every moment of that afternoon; and
before going home he took a long walk alone. He saw that Charles Whitney
had proposed a secret partnership, in which he was to play Whitney's game
and, in exchange, was to get control of the Ranger-Whitney Company. And
what Whitney had said about the folly of board managements, about the
insecurity of his own position, was undeniably true; and the sacrifice of
the "smaller morality" for the "larger good" would be merely doing what
the biographies of the world's men of achievement revealed them as doing
again and again. Further, once in control, once free to put into action
the plans for a truly vast concern, of which he had so often dreamed, he
could give Tecumseh a far larger income than it had ever hoped to have
through his father's gift, and also could himself be rich and powerful.
To the men who have operated with success and worldly acclaim under the
code of the "larger good," the men who have aggrandized themselves at the
expense of personal honor and the rights of others and the progress of
the race, the first, the crucial temptation to sacrifice "smaller
morality" and "short-sighted scruples" has always come in some such form
as it here presented itself to Arthur Ranger. The Napoleons begin as
defenders of rational freedom against the insane license of the mob; the
Rockefellers begin as cheapeners of a necessity of life to the straitened
millions of their fellow-beings.

If Arthur had been weak, he would have put aside the temptation through
fear of the consequences of failure. If he had been ignorant, he would
have put it aside through superstition. Being neither weak nor ignorant,
and having a human passion for wealth and power and a willingness to get
them if he could do it without sacrifice of self-respect, he sat calmly
down with the temptation and listened to it and debated with it. He was
silent all through dinner; and after dinner, when he and Madelene were in
their sitting room upstairs, she reading, he sat with his eyes upon her,
and continued to think.