"

"I guess you did," said Mr. Flint, "and I guess Humphrey Crewe saw him
before he went."

Victoria was silent, the recollection of the talk between Mr. Tooting and
Mr. Crewe running through her mind, and Mr. Tooting's saying that he had
done "dirty things" for the Northeastern. She felt that this was
something she could not tell her father, nor could she answer his
argument with what Tom Gaylord had said. She could not, indeed, answer
Mr. Flint's argument at all; the subject, as he had declared, being too
vast for her. And moreover, as she well knew, Mr. Flint was a man whom
other men could not easily answer; he bore them down, even as he had
borne her down. Involuntarily her mind turned to Austen, and she wondered
what he had said; she wondered how he would have answered her
father--whether he could have answered him. And she knew not what to
think. Could it be right, in a position of power and responsibility, to
acknowledge evil and deal with it as evil? That was, in effect, the gist
of Mr. Flint's contention. She did not know. She had never (strangely
enough, she thought) sought before to analyze the ethical side of her
father's character. One aspect of him she had shared with her mother,
that he was a tower of defence and strength, and that his name alone had
often been sufficient to get difficult things done.

Was he right in this? And were his opponents charlatans, or dupes, or
idealists who could never be effective? Mr. Crewe wanted an office; Tom
Gaylord had a suit against the road, and Austen Vane was going to bring
that suit! What did she really know of Austen Vane? But her soul cried
out treason at this, and she found herself repeating, with intensity, "I
believe in him! I believe in him!" She would have given worlds to have
been able to stand up before her father and tell him that Austen would
not bring the suit at this time that Austen had not allowed his name to
be mentioned for office in this connection, and had spurned Mr. Crewe's
advances. But she had not seen Austen since February.

What was his side of it? He had never told her, and she respected his
motives--yet, what was his side? Fresh from the inevitably deep
impressions which her father's personality had stamped upon her, she
wondered if Austen could cope with the argument before which she had been
so helpless.

The fact that she made of each of these two men the embodiment of a
different and opposed idea did not occur to Victoria until th