Yes, there was a cause, there was a reason for the miracle of disorder, or it would not have happened.  The hour had called forth the man; but the man had been there awaiting the strokes, listening, listening, with his ear to the wind.  It had been a triumph of personality, one of those rare dramatic occasions when the right man and the appointed time come together.  This the young man admitted candidly in the very moment when he told himself that he detested the demagogue and all his works.  A man who consistently made his bid for the support of the radical element!  Who stirred up the forces of discontent because he could harness them to his chariot!  A man who was born in a circus tent, and who still performed in public the tricks of a mountebank!  That this man had power, Stephen granted ungrudgingly; but it was power over the undisciplined, the half-educated, the mentally untrained.  It was power, as John Benham had once remarked with a touch of hyperbole, over empty stomachs.

There were persons in Stephen’s intimate circle (there are such persons even in the most conservative communities) who contended that Vetch was in his way a rude genius.  Judge Horatio Lancaster Page, for instance, insisted that the Governor had a charm of his own, that, “he wasn’t half bad to look at if you caught him smiling,” that he could even reason “like one of us,” if you granted him his premise.  After the open debate between Vetch and Benham—­the great John Benham, hero of war and peace, and tireless labourer in the vineyard of public service—­after this memorable discussion, Judge Horatio Lancaster Page had remarked, in his mild, unpolemical tone, that “though John had undoubtedly carried off the flowers of rhetoric, there was a good deal of wholesome green stuff about that fellow Vetch.”  But everybody knew that a man with a comical habit of mind could not be right.

Again the figure crossed the firelight between the muslin curtains, and to Stephen Culpeper, standing alone in the snow outside, that large impending presence embodied all that he and his kind had hated and feared for generations.  It embodied among other disturbances the law of change; and to Stephen and his race of pleasant livers the two sinister forces in the universe were change and death.  After all, they had made the world, these pleasant livers; and what were those other people—­the people represented by that ominous shadow—­except the ragged prophets of disorder and destruction?

Turning away, Stephen descended the wide brick walk which fell gradually, past the steps of the library and the gaunt railing round a motionless fountain, to the broad white slope of the Square with its smoky veil of twilight.  Farther away he saw the high iron fence and heard the clanging of passing street cars.  On his left the ugly shape of the library resembled some crude architectural design sketched on parchment.