“It was a bribe,” father protested; and Ernest nodded.

“Also, the beggar said that there was talk, tea-table gossip and so forth, about my daughter being seen in public with so notorious a character as you, and that it was not in keeping with university tone and dignity.  Not that he personally objected—­oh, no; but that there was talk and that I would understand.”

Ernest considered this announcement for a moment, and then said, and his face was very grave, withal there was a sombre wrath in it: 

“There is more behind this than a mere university ideal.  Somebody has put pressure on President Wilcox.”

“Do you think so?” father asked, and his face showed that he was interested rather than frightened.

“I wish I could convey to you the conception that is dimly forming in my own mind,” Ernest said.  “Never in the history of the world was society in so terrific flux as it is right now.  The swift changes in our industrial system are causing equally swift changes in our religious, political, and social structures.  An unseen and fearful revolution is taking place in the fibre and structure of society.  One can only dimly feel these things.  But they are in the air, now, to-day.  One can feel the loom of them—­things vast, vague, and terrible.  My mind recoils from contemplation of what they may crystallize into.  You heard Wickson talk the other night.  Behind what he said were the same nameless, formless things that I feel.  He spoke out of a superconscious apprehension of them.”

“You mean . . . ?” father began, then paused.

“I mean that there is a shadow of something colossal and menacing that even now is beginning to fall across the land.  Call it the shadow of an oligarchy, if you will; it is the nearest I dare approximate it.  What its nature may be I refuse to imagine.* But what I wanted to say was this:  You are in a perilous position—­a peril that my own fear enhances because I am not able even to measure it.  Take my advice and accept the vacation.”

* Though, like Everhard, they did not dream of the nature of it, there were men, even before his time, who caught glimpses of the shadow.  John C. Calhoun said:  “A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various and powerful interests, combined into one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks.”  And that great humanist, Abraham Lincoln, said, just before his assassination:  “I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . .  Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

“But it would be cowardly,” was the protest.