Diana did not reply.  She was, perhaps, a little troubled by Enoch’s calm and persistent declaration of principles.  It is not easy for a woman even of Diana’s poise and simple sincerity to keep in order a gentleman as distinguished and as courteous and as obviously in earnest as Enoch.

Finally, “Do you mind talking your own shop, Mr. Huntingdon?” she asked.

“Not at all,” replied Enoch eagerly.  “Is there some aspect of my work that interests you?”

“I imagine that all of it would,” said Diana.  “But I was not thinking of your work as a Cabinet Official.  I was thinking of you as Police Commissioner of New York.”

Enoch looked surprised.

“Father wrote to me the other day,” Diana went on, “and asked me to send him the collection of your speeches.  I bought it at Brentano’s and I don’t mind telling you that it pinched the Johnstown lunches a good bit to do so, but it was worth it, for I read the book before mailing it.”

“You’re not hinting that I ought to reimburse you, are you?” demanded Enoch, with a delighted chuckle.

“Well, no—­we’ll consider that the luncheon and this dinner square the Johnstown pinching, perhaps a trifle more.  What I wanted to say was that it struck me as worth comment that after you ceased being Police Commissioner, you never again talked of the impoverished boyhood of America.  And yet you were a very successful Commissioner, were you not?”

Enoch looked from Diana out over the balcony rail to the fountain that twinkled in the little park.

“One of the most difficult things in public life,” he said slowly, “is to hew straight to the line one laid out at the beginning.”

“I should think,” Diana suggested, “that the difficulty would depend on what the line was.  A man who goes into politics to make himself rich, for example, might easily stick to his original purpose.”

“Exactly!  But money of itself never interested me!” Here Enoch stopped with a quick breath.  There flashed across his inward vision the picture of a boy in Luigi’s second story, throwing dice with passionate intensity.  Enoch took a long sip of water, then went on.  “I wanted to be Police Commissioner of New York because I wanted to make it impossible for other boys to have a boyhood like mine.  I don’t mean that, quite literally, I thought one man or one generation could accomplish the feat.  But I did truly think I could make a beginning.  Miss Allen, in spite of the beautiful fights I had, in spite of the spectacular clean-ups we made, I did nothing for the boys that my successor did not wipe out with a single stroke of his pen, his first week in office.”

Diana drew a long breath.  “I wonder why,” she said.

“I think that lack of imagination, poor memory, personal selfishness, is the answer.  There is nothing people forget quite so quickly as the griefs of their own childhood.  There is nothing more difficult for people to imagine than how things affect a child’s mind.  And yet, nothing is so important in America to-day as the right kind of education for boys.  It has not been found as yet.”