“If that be true, what chances there are for men with the gift of true leadership and a love of pure justice in their hearts!” she said half-absently; and he started forward and said:  “I beg pardon?”

She let the blue-gray eyes meet his and there was a passing shadow of disappointment in them.

“I ought to beg yours.  I’m afraid I was thinking aloud.  But it is one of my dreams.  If I were a man I should go into politics.”

“To purify them?”

“To do my part in trying.  The great heart of the people is honest and well-meaning:  I think we all admit that.  And there is intelligence, too.  But human nature is the same as it used to be when they set up a man who could and called him a king.  Gentle or simple, it must be led.”

“There is no lack of leadership, such as it is,” he hazarded.

“No; but there seems to be a pitiful lack of the right kind:  men who will put self-seeking and unworthy ambition aside and lift the standard of justice and right-doing for its own sake.  Are there any such men nowadays?”

“I don’t know,” he rejoined gravely.  “Sometimes I’m tempted to doubt it.  It is a frantic scramble for place and power for the most part.  The kind of man you have in mind isn’t in it; shuns it as he would a plague spot.”

She contradicted him firmly.

“No, the kind of man I have in mind wouldn’t shun it; he would take hold with his hands and try to make things better; he would put the selfish temptations under foot and give the people a leader worth following—­be the real mind and hand of the well-meaning majority.”

Kent shook his head slowly.

“Not unless we admit a motive stronger than the abstraction which we call patriotism.”

“I don’t understand,” she said; meaning, rather, that she refused to understand.

“I mean that such a man, however exalted his views might be, would have to have an object more personal to him than the mere dutiful promptings of patriotism to make him do his best.”

“But that would be self-seeking again.”

“Not necessarily in the narrow sense.  The old knightly chivalry was a beautiful thing in its way, and it gave an uplift to an age which would have been frankly brutal without it:  yet it had its well-spring in what appeals to us now as being a rather fantastic sentiment.”

“And we are not sentimentalists?” she suggested.

“No; and it’s the worse for us in some respects.  You will not find your ideal politician until you find a man with somewhat of the old knightly spirit in him.  And I’ll go further and say that when you do find him he will be at heart the champion of the woman he loves rather than that of a political constituency.”

She became silent at that, and for a time the low sweet harmonies of the nocturne Penelope was playing filled the gap.