“I know,” he answered, “but that was in another life—­that was before the war.”

“Do those ideas never come back to you?  Have you lost your ambition?”

“I can’t tell.  I sometimes think that it died in France.  I got to feel over there that these political issues were merely local and temporary.  Often, the greater part of the time, I suppose, I feel like that now.  Then suddenly all my old ambition comes back in a spurt, and for a little while I think I am cured.  While that lasts I am as eager, as full of interest, as I used to be.  But it dies down as suddenly as it sprang up, and the reaction is only indifference and lassitude.  I seem to have lost the power to keep a single state of mind, or even an interest.”

“But do you ever think seriously of the part you might take in this town?”

The look of immobility passed from his face; his eyes grew warmer, and it seemed to her that he became more alive and more human.  “Oh, I think a great deal.  My ideas have changed too.”  He was talking rapidly and without connection.  “I am not the same man that I was a few years ago.  I may be wrong, but I feel that I’ve got down to a firmer basis—­a basis of facts.”  Then he turned to her impulsively, “I wouldn’t say this to any one else, Corinna, because no one else would understand what I mean—­but I’ve learned a good deal from Gideon Vetch.”

“Ah!” Her eyes were smiling.  “I think I know what you mean.”

“Of course you know.  But imagine Father!  He would think, if I told him, that it was a symptom of mental derangement—­that some German shell had left a permanent dent in my brain.”

“Perhaps.  Yet I am not sure that you understand your father.  I think he is more like you than you fancy; that if you once pierced his reserve, you would find him a sentimentalist at heart.  There is your office,” she added, “but you must not get out now.  We will turn back for a quarter of an hour.”  She spoke to the chauffeur, and then said to Stephen, with a sensation of unutterable relief, “a quarter of an hour won’t make any difference at the office to-day.”

“Perhaps not when I’ve lost three hours already.  I sometimes think they would never notice it if I stayed away all the time.  But what I mean about Vetch is simply that he has set me thinking.  He does that, you know.  Oh, I admit that he is mistaken—­or downright wrong—­in a number of ways!  He is too sensational for our taste—­too flamboyant; but one can’t get away from him.  He has shaken the dust from us; he has jolted us into movement.  I have a feeling somehow that his personality is spread all over the place—­that we are smeared with Gideon Vetch, as the darkeys would say.”

He was already a different Stephen from the one who had got into her car an hour ago, and she breathed a secret prayer of thanksgiving.

“I think even John feels that now and then,” she said, and a moment afterward, “Is it possible, do you suppose, that we shall find when it is too late that this Gideon Vetch is the stone that the builders rejected?  A ridiculous fancy, and yet who knows, it might turn out to be true.  Stranger things have happened than that!”