It was the familiar chicanery of the popular leader, the justification of expediency, that Stephen had always found most repugnant as a political theory; and while he drew back, repelled and disgusted, he asked himself if the national conscience, the moral integrity of the race, was in the keeping of demagogues?

“I am curious to know,” he remarked after a moment, “how you are able to justify the sacrifice of what I regard as common honesty in public affairs?”

To his surprise, instead of answering directly, Vetch put a personal question.  “Then you think I am not honest?  Darrow wouldn’t agree with you.”

At this Darrow turned from the window.  “Perhaps he doesn’t mean what we do,” he said quietly.  “I’ve seen honest men that I knew ought to have been in prison.”

“I am speaking of course of the doctrines you advocate,” answered Stephen.  “That seems to me to be, in the jargon of the reformer, somewhat unethical.  Can you, I question, achieve anything important enough to compensate for what you sacrifice?”

Darrow turned again with his dry laugh.  “You speak as if public honesty, by which I reckon you mean clean elections and unsold offices, were something we had actually possessed,” he said.

“Oh, I know the old proceedings were bad enough,” replied Stephen, “but I am trying to find out how the Governor expects to make them better.  You understand that I am trying merely to see your point of view—­to get at the roots of your theory of government.  What you tell me will never find its way to the public.”

“I realize that,” said Vetch gravely, and he added with a quick glance at Darrow:  “Do you think if I were not honest that I’d talk to you so frankly?”

Stephen smiled.  “It might be.  The political coat has many colours.  I don’t mean to be rude, you know, but one good turn in frankness deserves another.”

“I like you the better for that.”  A cluster of fine lines appeared at the corners of the Governor’s laughing eyes.  “But, once for all, you must get rid of your false impressions of me, and see me as a fact, not as a kind of social scarecrow.  First of all, you think I am an extremist—­well, I am not.  I am merely a man of facts.  I see the world as it is and you see it as you wish it to be—­that is the difference between us.  I have lived with realities; I know actual conditions—­and you know only what you have been told or imagined.  Oh, I admit that you saw an edge of reality in the trenches; but, after all, life in the trenches was as abnormal as life in the movies.  Each represents an extreme.  What you know of average human life, of hunger and pain and labour, could be learned in an academy for young ladies.  Yet you imagine that it is experience!  You have lived so long in your lily-pond, with the rushes hemming you in, that when you hear all the frogs croaking on the same note, you think complacently, ’that is the voice of the people’.  Why, I tell you, man, you are so ignorant of the conditions in this very town, that Darrow could take you out and show you things that would make you feel like Robinson Crusoe!”