She raised her lashes and gave him a glance charged with meaning.  “That depends,” she answered, and suddenly, without warning, she passed to the lightest and gayest of tones.  “Everything depends on something else, doesn’t it?  Now Father is coming out, and I must run upstairs and dress.”

It was a dismissal, he knew, and yet he hesitated.  “May I come again soon?” he asked, and held out his hand.

To his surprise Patty greeted his question with a laugh.  “Do you really like politics so much?” she retorted; and fled lightly toward the staircase beyond the library.

CHAPTER XII

A JOURNEY INTO MEAN STREETS

Darrow’s little car was waiting before the entrance; and as soon as Stephen had taken his place by the old man’s side, they shot forward into the smoky twilight.  A policeman, standing in the circle of electric light at the corner, held up a warning hand; and then, as he recognized Darrow, he nodded with a smile, and there stole into his face the look of deference which Stephen had seen in the Governor’s eyes.  Glancing up at the sombre ruggedness of the profile beside him, the younger man asked himself curiously from what source of character or Circumstance this old man had derived his strange impressiveness and his Authority over men.  With his gaunt length, his wide curving nostrils, his thick majestic lips, he looked, as Stephen had first seen him, a rock-hewn Pharaoh of a man.  An unusual type to survive in modern America—­republican and imperial!  Did he represent, this carpenter who was also a politician, the political despotism of the worker—­the crook and scourge of the labourer’s power?

Suddenly, while he wondered, Darrow turned toward him.  “What do you think of the Governor?”

“I hardly know,” answered Stephen thoughtfully.  “It is too soon to ask; but I think he is honest.”

“He is more than honest,” rejoined the other quietly.  “He is human.  He understands.  He belongs to us.”

“Belongs?” Stephen repeated the word with a note of interrogation.

Very slowly the old man answered.  “I mean that he is more than anything that he says or thinks.  He is bigger than his message.”

“I suppose he stands for a great deal?”

“A man stands only for what he is, not for an inch more, not for an inch less.  The trouble with all the leaders we’ve had in the past was that their thought outstripped their characters.  They believed more than they were and they broke down under it.  I’m an old man now.  I’ve watched them come and go.”

“You think that Vetch is a great leader?”

“I think he is a great leader, but I don’t mean that I think he will ever lead us anywhere.”

“You feel that he is losing his grip on the crowd?”

Up from Main Street the workers were pouring out of the factories; and while they moved in a dark stream through the light and shadow on the pavement, the faces flowed past Stephen with a pallid intensity which made him think of dead flowers drifting on a river.  In all those faces how little life there seemed, how little individuality and animation!