suddenly that on her fourteenth birthday she had bought a pair of paste earrings with ten dollars her father had given her; and for the sting of this reminder she knew that she should never forgive Gershom.  Oh, she had no patience with a man who couldn’t find out things and learn without asking questions!  Hadn’t she tried and tried, and made mistakes and tried again, and still gone on trying by hook or by crook; as her father would say, to find out the thousand and one things she oughtn’t to do?  If she, even as a child, had struggled so hard to improve herself and change in the right way, not the wrong way—­then why shouldn’t he?  Her father, of course, wasn’t polished, but he was as unlike Gershom as if they had been born as far apart as the poles.  Even to her untrained eyes it was evident that Vetch possessed the authority of personality—­a sanction that was not social but moral.  Some inherent dislike for anything that was not solid, that was not genuine, had served Vetch as a kind of aesthetic discrimination.

“I know Benham,” Gershom was saying eagerly.  “I’ve worked with him.  Smart chap, don’t you think?  Ever heard him speak?”

“No, I hate speeches.”

“Did he and the Governor have any words?”

“Of course they didn’t—­not at dinner,” she replied with a crushing manner.  “Father is waiting for you.”

“Then you’ll see me to-morrow?  I’ve got a lot I want to say to you.  And I’ll tell you this right now, Patty, my dear, you may run round with these high-faluting chaps like Culpeper as much as you please; but how many dinner parties do you think you’d be invited to if I hadn’t put the old man where he is?”

At this she turned on him furiously, her eyes blazing through their greenish mist.  “I don’t owe you anything, and you know it!” she retorted defiantly.  Then before he could detain her she broke away from him and ran up the stairs.  How dared he pretend that he had placed her under an obligation!  As if it made any difference to her whether her father were Governor or not!

As she fled upward she heard Gershom follow Vetch into the library, and she knew that they would sit talking there until long after midnight.  These discussions had become frequent of late; and she surmised vaguely, though Vetch never mentioned Gershom’s name to her, that the two men were no longer upon the friendly terms of the old days.  Ever since Vetch’s election, it had seemed to her that the pack of hungry politicians had closed in about him; and only the day before, when she had gone over to the Governor’s office in the Capitol building, she had run away from what she merrily described as “the famished wolves” waiting outside his door.  It was clear even to her that the political leaders who had supported Vetch were beginning already to distrust him.  They had sought, she realized, to use his popularity, his eloquence, his earnestness, for their own ends; and they were making the historic discovery that the man who possesses these affirmative qualities is seldom without the will to preserve them.  In their superficial ploughing of the soil, Vetch’s adherents had at last struck against the rock of resistance.  A man of ambition, or a man of prejudice, they might have controlled; but, as Patty had learned long ago, Vetch was that most difficult of political problems—­the man of an idea.