variable personality, which appeared to shift and alter according to the temperament or the convictions of each observer?  She had never known two men who agreed about Vetch, except perhaps Benham and his disciple, Stephen Culpeper.  Each man saw Vetch differently, and was this because each man saw in the great demagogue only the particular virtue or vice for which he was looking, the reflection of personal preferences or aversions?  It seemed to her suddenly that the Governor, whom she had thought commonplace, towered an immense vague figure in a cloud of misinterpretation and misunderstanding.  His followers believed in him; his opponents distrusted him; but was this not true of every political leader since the beginning of politics?  The power to inspire equally devotion and hatred had been throughout history the authentic sign of the saviour and of the destroyer.  Her curiosity, which had waned, flared up more strongly than ever.

“I should like to know,” she said aloud, “what he is truthfully?”

Benham laughed as he rose to go.  “Do you think he can be anything truthfully?”

“Oh, yes, even if it is only a demagogue.”

“Only a demagogue!  My dear Corinna, the demagogue is the one everlasting and unalterable American institution.  He is the idol of the Senate chamber; the power behind the Constitution.”

“But what does he really stand for—­Vetch, I mean?”

“Ask him.  He would enjoy telling you.”

“Would he enjoy telling me the truth?”

With the laughter still in his eyes Benham drew nearer and stood looking down on her.  “Oh, I don’t mean that he is pure humbug.  I haven’t a doubt, as I told you, that he believes, sufficiently at least for election purposes, in the fallacies that he advocates, even in the old age pension, the minimum, or more accurately, the maximum wage, and of course in what doesn’t sound so Utopian since we have experimented with it, that favourite dogma of the near-Socialists, the Government ownership of railroads.  His main theory, however, appears to be some far-fetched abstraction which he calls the humanizing of industry—­you’ve heard that before!  Mere bombast, you see, but the kind of thing that is dangerous in a crowd.  It is the catchpenny politics that has been the curse of our country.”

“And of course he is not a gentleman.”  Corinna’s voice was regretful.  “I may be old-fashioned, but I can’t help feeling that the Governor ought to be a gentleman.  That sounds like General Plummer, I know,” she concluded apologetically.

“The archaic cult of the gentleman?  Well, I like to think that in Virginia it still has a few obscure followers.  It is a prejudice that I dare to admit only when I am not on the platform, for the belief in the gentleman has become a kind of underground religion, like the worship in the Catacombs.”

Her eyes had grown wistful when she answered:  “It is the price we pay for democracy.”