her the power that is so hard to relinquish?"

The feelings of Augustus Flint when he heard this question were of a
complex nature. It was the second time that day he had been shocked,
--the first being when Hilary Vane had unexpectedly defended his son. The
word Victoria had used, power, had touched him on the quick. What had she
meant by it? Had she been his wife and not his daughter, he would have
flown into a rage. Augustus Flint was not a man given to the
psychological amusement of self-examination; he had never analyzed his
motives. He had had little to do with women, except Victoria. The Rose of
Sharon knew him as the fountainhead from which authority and money
flowed, but Victoria, since her childhood, had been his refuge from care,
and in the haven of her companionship he had lost himself for brief
moments of his life. She was the one being he really loved, with whom he
consulted on such affairs of importance as he felt to be within her scope
and province,--the cattle, the men on the place outside of the household,
the wisdom of buying the Baker farm; bequests to charities, paintings,
the library; and recently he had left to her judgment the European baths
and the kind of treatment which her mother had required. Victoria had
consulted with the physicians in Paris, and had made these decisions
herself. From a child she had never shown a disposition to evade
responsibility.

To his intimate business friends, Mr. Flint was in the habit of speaking
of her as his right-hand man, but she was circumscribed by her sex,--or
rather by Mr. Flint's idea of her sex,--and it never occurred to him that
she could enter into the larger problems of his life. For this reason he
had never asked himself whether such a state of affairs would be
desirable. In reality it was her sympathy he craved, and such an
interpretation of himself as he chose to present to her.

So her question was a shock. He suddenly beheld his daughter transformed,
a new personality who had been thinking, and thinking along paths which
he had never cared to travel.

"The power!" he repeated. "What do you mean by that, Victoria?"

She sat for a moment on the end of the bench, gazing at him with a
questioning, searching look which he found disconcerting. What had
happened to his daughter? He little guessed the tumult in her breast. She
herself could not fully understand the strange turn the conversation had
taken towards the gateway of the vital things.

"