It was quite late, and the talk had again drifted around to a one-sided discussion of practical politics in the Western definition of the term, when Gantry, pleading weariness on the score of his hard week’s work at the railroad meeting, went to bed.  The summer night was at its perfect best, and Blount was still wakeful enough to refill his pipe and well-balanced enough to be thankful for a little solitude in which to set in order his plans for the newly struck-out future.  In the later talk with Gantry he had learned many things about the political situation in his native State, things which were enlightening if not particularly encouraging.  Trained in the ethics of a theoretical school, he knew only enough about practical politics to be very certain in his own mind that they were all wrong.  And if Gantry’s account could be trusted, there were none but practical politics in the State where his father was reputed to be the dictator.

Hitherto his ambition had been to build up a modest business practice in some Eastern city, and, like other aspiring young lawyers, he had been filling out the perspective of the picture with the look ahead to a possible time when some great corporation should need his services in permanence.  He was of the new generation, and he knew that the lawyer of the courts was slowly but surely giving place to the lawyer of business.  Without attempting to carry the modern business situation bodily over into the domain of pure ethics, he was still young enough and enthusiastic enough to lay down the general principle that a great corporation, being itself a creation of the law, must necessarily be law-abiding, and, if not entirely ethical in its dealings with the public, at least equitably just.  Therefore his ideal in his own profession was the man who could successfully safeguard large interests, promote the beneficent outreachings of corporate capital, and be the adviser of the man or men to whom the greater America owes its place at the head of the civilized nations.

Oddly enough, though Gantry’s attitude had been uncompromisingly partisan, Blount had failed to recognize in the railroad official a skilful pleader for the special interests—­the interests of the few against those of the many.  Hence he was preparing to go to the new field with a rather strong prepossession in favor of the defendant corporation.  In their later conversation Gantry had intimated pretty broadly that there was room for an assistant corporation counsel for the railroad, with headquarters in the capital of the Sage-brush State.  Blount assumed that the requirements, in the present crisis at least, would be political rather than legal, and in his mind’s eye he saw himself in the prefigured perspective, standing firmly as the defender of legitimate business rights in a region where popular prejudice was capable of rising to anarchistic heights of denunciation and attack.

The picture pleased him; he would scarcely have been a true descendant of the fighting Blounts of Tennessee if the prospect of a conflict had been other than inspiring.  If there were to be no Patricia in his future, ambition must be made to fill all the horizons; and since work is the best surcease for any sorrow, he found himself already looking forward in eager anticipation to the moment when he could begin the grapple, man-wise and vigorously, in the new environment.