Rann even while he condemned him.  For an instant—­a single instant—­he had found himself shrinking from the combat, and in the shock of self-contempt which followed he had hurled the shock of his resentment upon the tempter.  In that moment of weakness it had seemed to him an easy thing to let one’s self go; to yield to a friendly, if distrusted force; to place gratified ambition above the sting of wounded scruples.  Was he infallible that he should make his judgment a law, or without reproach that he should set his conscience as an arbiter?

Then in a sudden illumination he had seen the betrayal of his sophistry, and he had stood his ground—­for the strong man is not he who is impervious to weaknesses, but he who, scorning his failures, towers over them.  He had felt the temptation and he had wavered, but not for long.  In all his periods of storm and stress he had found that his nature rebounded in the end.  Disquietude might waste his ardour; but give him time to reorganise his forces, and his moral energy would triumph at the last.

As he looked out upon the great bronze Washington against the sad-coloured sky, he realised, with a pang like the thrust of homesickness, the isolation in which he stood.  An instinctive need to justify himself had risen within him, and with it awoke the knowledge that beyond that uncertain abstraction which he called “the People,” he was an alien among his kind.  Galt was his friend, Tom Bassett he could count on, a score of others would stand or fall in his service, but where was the single emotion which bound him to humanity?  Where the common claim of kinship which belonged to Galt, to Bassett, and to all mankind?  He had known many men, but he knew not one who was not drawn by some connecting link that was apart from patriotism, or ambition, or desire.  Then quickly there came to him, not the judge, who was the parent of his intellect, but the withered little woman, who was not even the mother of his body.  The only happiness that rose and set in him was that pitiable happiness that could not think his thoughts or speak his speech.  It had never occurred to him that he loved Marthy Burr—­his kindness had been wholly compassionate—­it was the knowledge that she loved him that now illuminated her image.  It was the old blind craving born again, to be first with somebody—­for there are moods in which it is better to be adored by a dog than to adore a divinity.  He beheld Eugenia’s womanhood as “A sword afar off”; but with him was the eternal commonplace—­his stepmother’s sharp, pained eyes and shrivelled hands.  He had loved Eugenia until there was nothing left; now he wanted to be loved, if by a dog.

He raised his head and smiled upon the bronze Washington and the sad-coloured sky.  In the drive below men were passing, and from time to time he recognised a figure.  He saw only men down there, and the thought came to him that his was a man’s world—­only in the outside circle might he catch the flutter of a woman’s dress.  He turned and went back to his desk and his work.