“Sure thing.  Your cousin Robert Breck; and that son-in-law of his—­what’s his name?  And some other representatives of our oldest families,—­Alec Pound.  He’s a reformer now, you know.  They put him on the resolutions committee.  Sam Ogilvy was there, he’d be classed as respectably conservative.  And one of the Ewanses.  I could name a few others, if you pressed me.  That brother of Fowndes who looks like an up-state minister.  A lot of women—­Miller Gorse’s sister, Mrs. Datchet, who never approved of Miller.  Quite a genteel gathering, I give you my word, and all astonished and mad as hell when the speaking was over.  Mrs. Datchet said she had been living in a den of iniquity and vice, and didn’t know it.”

“It must have been amusing,” I said.

“It was,” said Ralph.  “It’ll be more amusing later on.  Oh, yes, there was another fellow who spoke I forgot to mention—­that queer Dick who was in your class, Krebs, got the school board evidence, looked as if he’d come in by freight.  He wasn’t as popular as the rest, but he’s got more sense than all of them put together.”

“Why wasn’t he popular?”

“Well, he didn’t crack up the American people,—­said they deserved all they got, that they’d have to learn to think straight and be straight before they could expect a square deal.  The truth was, they secretly envied these rich men who were exploiting their city, and just as long as they envied them they hadn’t any right to complain of them.  He was going into this campaign to tell the truth, but to tell all sides of it, and if they wanted reform, they’d have to reform themselves first.  I admired his nerve, I must say.”

“He always had that,” I remarked.  “How did they take it?”

“Well, they didn’t like it much, but I think most of them had a respect for him.  I know I did.  He has a whole lot of assurance, an air of knowing what he’s talking about, and apparently he doesn’t give a continental whether he’s popular or not.  Besides, Greenhalge had cracked him up to the skies for the work he’d done for the school board.”

“You talk as if he’d converted you,” I said.

Ralph laughed as he rose and stretched himself.

“Oh, I’m only the intelligent spectator, you ought to know that by this time, Hughie.  But I thought it might interest you, since you’ll have to go on the stump and refute it all.  That’ll be a nice job.  So long.”

And he departed.  Of course I knew that he had been baiting me, his scent for the weaknesses of his friends being absolutely fiendish.  I was angry because he had succeeded,—­because he knew he had succeeded.  All the morning uneasiness possessed me, and I found it difficult to concentrate on the affairs I had in hand.  I felt premonitions, which I tried in vain to suppress, that the tide of the philosophy of power and might were starting to ebb:  I scented vague calamities ahead, calamities I associated with Krebs; and when I went out to the