tion of what the world ought to be. It's the
plain fact about what a man must be if he's to get results. You and I
both have heard your grandfather say many times that he'd like to play
politics with angels--if only he could find the angels. It's hard to own
up, when you're young, that human nature is just as it is. I understand
how you feel. I know you feel it's a very strange thing for me to
do--talk to you like this. But I want you to understand that my father
has had nothing to do with it."

He turned to her accusingly.

"But I know perfectly well," he said, bitterly, "that it isn't any
personal interest you take in me that makes you say it. You don't think
enough of me for that." It was resentment so naively boyish that her
astonishment checked her remonstrance. He rushed on. "You hold up Linton
for me to follow. That's the kind of a man you admire. He's an orator,
and he's smart, and he wins. I'm only an accident. You meant that when
you said that General Waymouth won out only because matters were mixed
up in politics. You don't care anything about me, personally. But you're
talking to me because my grandfather asked you to. That's it." He
guessed shrewdly.

That outburst betrayed him. This young man from the north country was
very human after all, she decided.

"I have said before, this is a campaign of honesty. Your grandfather did
ask me to talk to you. I didn't have the heart to refuse him, for I'm
very fond of him."

It was an acknowledgment that stung his pride. But more than all, it
stirred that vague rancor he had felt the first time he had seen Linton
appropriate her.

He did not choose gallant words for reply.

"He has set you on me, has he, to pull me away from what I think is
right? He wants me to be like the rest of 'em, eh? I can be an
understudy for Herbert Linton and an errand boy for the State machine! I
didn't think, Miss Presson, that you--"

"You'd better not go any further, Mr. Harlan Thornton. My affection for
an old man who has set his heart on your success has brought me into
this affair, and I assure you I don't enjoy the situation. You are not
asked to betray any one, or desert any high moral pinnacle, or do
anything else that the moralists say all these fine things about without
knowing what they mean half the time. You are reminded of this: that
there's only one General Waymouth. There's a sudden big call for him
because factions have got into a row with each other. Folks will