“Why shouldn’t I make myself uncomfortable for a little while?  I have never known anything but comfort.”

“But that’s your blessing; no matter how much you want to do it you can’t remove all the unhappiness in the world—­not even by dividing with the less fortunate.  I’ve never been able to follow that philosophy.”

“Maybe,” she said, “you have never tried it!” She was seeking neither to convince him nor to accomplish his discomfiture and to this end was maintaining her share of the dialogue to the accompaniment of a smile of amity.

“Maybe I never have,” he replied slowly.  “I didn’t have your advantage of seeing a place to begin.”

“But you have the advantage of every one; you have the thing that I can never hope to have, that I don’t ask for:  you have the power in your hands to do everything!”

His quick, direct glance expressed curiosity as to whether she were appealing to his vanity or implying a sincere belief in his power.

“Power is too large a word to apply to me, Miss Garrison.  I have had a good deal of experience in politics, and in politics you can’t do all you like.”

“I didn’t question that:  men of the finest intentions seem to fail, and they will probably go on failing.  I know that from books; you know it of course from actual dealings with the men who find their way to responsible places, and who very often fail to accomplish the things we expect of them.”

“The aims of most of the reformers are futile from the beginning.  Legislatures can pass laws; they pass far too many; but they can’t make ideal conditions out of those laws.  I’ve seen it tried.”

“Yesterday, when you were able to make that convention do exactly what you wanted it to, without even being there to watch it, it must have been because of some ideal you were working for.  You thought you were serving some good purpose; it wasn’t just spite or to show your power.  It couldn’t have been that!”

“I did it,” he said doggedly, as though to destroy with a single blunt thrust her tower of illusions—­“I did it to smash a man named Thatcher.  There wasn’t any ideal nonsense about it.”

He frowned, surprised and displeased that he had spoken so roughly.  He rarely let go of himself in that fashion.  He expected her to take advantage of his admission to point a moral; but she said instantly:—­

“Then, you did it beautifully!  There was a certain perfection about it; it was, oh, immensely funny!”

She laughed, tossing her head lightly, a laugh of real enjoyment, and he was surprised to find himself laughing with her.  It seemed that the Thatcher incident was not only funny, but that its full humorous value had not until that moment been wholly realized by either of them.