Again Mrs. Culpeper sniffed.  “Every one knows he is merely a tool in the hands of those people,” she said.

In the weeks that followed Stephen heard his mother’s opinion repeated wherever he went.  Everywhere the strike was discussed, and everywhere, in the Culpeper’s circle, Gideon Vetch and his policies were repudiated.  It was generally believed that the strike would be called, and that the Governor had been, as old General Plummer neatly put it, “bought off by the riff-raff.”  There were those, and the General was among them, who thought that Vetch had been definitely threatened by the labour leaders.  There were open charges of “shady dealings” in the newspapers; hints that he had got the office of Governor “by striking a bargain” with the faction whose tool he had become.  “Don’t tell me, sir, that they didn’t put him there because they knew they could count on him!” roared old Powhatan, with the accumulated truculence of eighty quarrelsome years.  Of course the General was intemperate; but, as the Judge observed facetiously, “it was refreshing, in these days when there was nothing for decent people to drink, to find that intemperance was still possible.  With the General fuming over corruption and Benham preaching morality, there is no need,” he added, “for us to despair of virtue.”

For the people who condemned Vetch were quite as emphatic in praise of John Benham; and in these weeks of unrest and anxiety, Corinna’s face was glowing with pride and pleasure.  That Benham, in his unselfish service, was leading the way, no one doubted.  Tireless, unrewarded,—­for it was admitted by those who esteemed him most that he was never really in touch with the crowd, that his zeal awakened no human response,—­he had sacrificed his private practice in order to devote himself day and night to averting the strike.  Stephen, inspired to hero worship, asked himself again what the difference was, beyond simple personal rectitude, between Vetch and Benham?  Vetch, lacking, so far as the young man knew, every public virtue except the human touch which enkindles either the souls or the imaginations of men, could overturn Benham’s argument with a dramatic gesture, an emotional phrase.  Why was it that Benham, possessing both the character of the patriot and the graces of the orator, should fall short in the one indefinable attribute which makes a man the natural leader of men?

“People admire him, but they won’t follow him,” Stephen thought in perplexity.  “Vetch has something that Benham lacks; and it is this something that makes people believe in him in spite of themselves.”

This idea was in his mind when he met Benham one day on the steps of his club, and stopped to congratulate him on the great speech he had made the evening before.

“By Jove, it makes me want to throw my hat into the ring!” he exclaimed, half in jest, half in earnest.

“I wish you would,” replied the other gravely.  “We need young men.  It is youth that turns the world.”