“I trust,” he began, “that my man expressed to you my deep regret—­my deep distress over—­”

“Don’t . . . please, don’t,” interrupted Eleanor, with a passionate break in her voice.  “I know you are honest, Senator Moyese, honest to what you believe is right; and I don’t want you to feel that you have to lie because I am a woman.”

The Senator opened his mouth, took a breath, and shut it again.

She understood him well enough to know that if he had to toy with his glasses for a twelve month, he would wait for her to play down first.  Yet she recognized the instinct of his manhood to rescue the confusion of her embarrassment when he put forward his hand casually and said—­“See my roses, Miss Eleanor?  They are a new variety of American Beauties.  See, each petal has a white veining?  Know how those roses are produced?  Ages and ages of poor trash worthless common roses have been sacrificed to produce this perfect type.”

“That’s your theory of life, isn’t it?” she asked, vaguely conscious that the dragon was disarming her anger.

“Isn’t it nature’s?” asked Moyese gently.  “The fit survive because they are fit; the exceptional; the few; while the worthless go to waste?”

Before Eleanor realized, she had lost all consciousness of self and was pleading passionately leaning forward across the desk.

“Isn’t Christ’s theory better, Senator, to make all the unfit into fit?  Isn’t Christ’s theory the theory of science?  Science aims to make a whole field of perfect corn; not just one perfect cob.  I know that; for I read it in your speech at the opening of the Agricultural College.  If we keep on sacrificing the interests of the many to the interests of the few, aren’t we working back to savagery, Senator?”

The Senator drew the finest of the roses from the jar.  “It’s a matter of taste, perhaps, Miss Eleanor; but I prefer this to a whole jarful of scrubs.”

“Then you are not working for democracy.  It’s just as Mrs. Williams says, all you foreign multimillionaires are subverting our Nation by working for old fashioned despotism in disguise; sacrificing the many to the few.”

“Oh, does Mrs. Williams say that?” asked Moyese reflectively, pushing back from the desk and clasping his hands round one knee.  “That may be; republicanism doesn’t necessarily mean letting the blockheads rule!  It may mean giving equal opportunity for the fit men to come to the top and rule.  Did you come in to talk over these things with me, Miss Eleanor?  I must make a convert of you; it would win over Wayland and Williams and your father.”

“No, I didn’t.  I came in here by mistake.  The operator told me I’d find a public telephone across the road; and I wasn’t noticing where I was going, and I came in here; but all the way down, I had been thinking of you, Senator Moyese.  I kept thinking if you could only be made to see the New Day that is dawning, perhaps you would meet it half way.  I rode in the driver’s seat coming down; and he told me how he lost his arm; Senator, think of the hero in him?”