“Father!” gasped Corinna.  “Stephen, do you think he has gone out of his mind?”

“That is the first sign that wisdom has broken its cage,” commented her father.  “No, my dear, I did not mean that you look like him; you are far handsomer.  I meant simply that you both habitually speak the truth, and because you speak the truth the world mistakes you for a successful comedian and Vetch for a kind of political Robin Hood.”

“Well, he is trying to hold us up in highwayman fashion, isn’t he?” asked Corinna.

“Does it look that way?” inquired the Judge, with his beaming smile which cast an edge of genial irony on everything that he said.  “On the contrary, it seems to me that Vetch is telling us the things we have known about ourselves for a very long time.  He says the world might be a better place if we would only take the trouble to make it so; if we would only try to live up to our epitaphs, I believe he once remarked.  He says also, I understand, that he is trying to climb to the top over somebody else; and when I say ‘he’ I mean, of course, his order or his class, whatever the fashionable phrase is.  Now, unfortunately, there appears to be but one way of reaching the top of the world, doesn’t there?—­and that is by climbing up on something or somebody.  Even you, my dear Stephen, who occupy that high place, merely inherited the seat from somebody who scrambled up there a few centuries ago.  Somebody else probably got broken shoulders before your nimble progenitor took possession.  Of course I am willing to admit that time does create in us the sense of a divine right in anything that we have owned for a number of years, as if our inheritance were the crown of some archaic king.  I myself feel that strongly.  If it came to the point, though I have said that I am too old to fight for distressed Virtue, I should very likely die in the last ditch for every inch of land and every worthless object I ever owned.  When Vetch talks about taxing property more heavily I am utterly and openly against him because it is my instinct to be.  I refuse to give up my superfluous luxuries in the cause of equal justice for all, and I shall fight against it as long as there is a particle of fight left in my bones.  But because I am against him there is no reason, I take it, why I shouldn’t enjoy the pleasure of perceiving his point of view.  It is an interesting point of view, perhaps the more interesting because we think it is a dangerous one.  To approach it is like rounding a sharp curve at high speed.”

As he rose to his feet and reached for his walking stick, Stephen remembered that in England the Judge was supposed to have the fine presence and the flashing eagle eyes of Gladstone.  Were they alike also, he wondered, in their fantastic mental processes?

“It’s time for me to go, Corinna,” said the old man, stooping to kiss his daughter, “so I shan’t see you until to-morrow.”  Then turning to Stephen, he added with a whimsical smile, “If you are so much afraid of Vetch, why don’t you fight him with his own weapons?  What were you doing, you and John, when the people voted for him?”