“If I could answer that,” she would say to him, “I should be entitled to a monument more enduring than brass.  The comfort and happiness of mankind isn’t to be won in a day:  we mustn’t pull up the old tree till we’ve got a new one planted and growing.”

“The Great Experiment will turn out all right yet!  Some fellow we never heard of will give the lever a jerk some day, and there will be a rumble and a flash and it will run perfectly,” he asserted.

The state campaign got under way in October, and Harwood was often discussed in relation to it.  Allen always praised Dan extravagantly, and was ever alert to defend him against her criticisms.

“My dad will run the roller over Bassett, but Dan will be smart enough to get from under.  It’s the greatest show on earth—­continuous vaudeville—­this politics!  Dan’s all right.  He’s got more brains than Bassett.  One of these days Dan will take a flop and land clean over in the Thatcher camp.  It’s only a matter of time.  Gratitude and considerations like that are holding him back.  But I’m not a partisan—­not even on dad’s side.  I’m the philosopher who sits on the fence and keeps the score by innings.”

It seemed to her, in those days and afterward, that Allen symbolized the unknown quantity in all the problems that absorbed him.  His idealism was not a thing of the air, but a flowering from old and vigorous roots.  His politics was a kind of religion, and it did not prove upon analysis to be either so fantastical or so fanatical as she had believed at first.  As the days shortened, he would prolong their walk until the shops and factories discharged their employees upon the streets.  The fine thing about the people was, he said, the fact that they were content to go on from day to day, doing the things they did, when the restraints upon them were so light,—­it proved the enduring worth of the Great Experiment.  Then they would plunge into the thick of the crowd and cross the Monument plaza, where he never failed to pay a tribute in his own fashion to the men the gray shaft commemorated.  In these walks they spoke French, which he employed more readily than she:  in his high moods it seemed to express him better than English.  It amused him to apply new names to the thoroughfares they traversed.  For example, he gayly renamed Monument Place the Place de la Concorde, assuring her that the southward vista in the Rue de la Meridienne, disclosing the lamp-bestarred terrace of the new Federal Building, and the electric torches of the Monument beyond, was highly reminiscent of Paris.  Sylvia was able to dramatize for herself, from the abundant material he artlessly supplied, the life he had led abroad during his long exile:  as a youngster he had enjoyed untrammeled freedom of the streets of Paris and Berlin, and he showed a curiously developed sympathy for the lives of the poor and unfortunate that had been born of those early experiences.  He was a great resource to her, and she enjoyed him as she would have enjoyed a girl comrade.  He confessed his admiration for Marian in the frankest fashion.  She was adorable; the greatest girl in the world.