“I knew you had this Meader business in mind,” he said.  “I knew you had fanciful notions about—­some things.  Never told you I didn’t want you here, did I?”

“No,” said Austen, “but—­”

Would have told you if I hadn’t wanted you—­wouldn’t I?”

“I hope so, Judge,” said Austen, who understood something of the feeling which underlay this brusqueness.  That knowledge made matters all the harder for him.

“It was your mother’s house—­you’re entitled to that, anyway,” said the Honourable Hilary, “but what I want to know is, why you didn’t advise that eternal fool of a Meader to accept what we offered him.  You’ll never get a county jury to give as much.”

“I did advise him to accept it,” answered Austen.

“What’s the matter with him?” the Honourable Hilary demanded.

“Well, judge, if you really want my opinion, an honest farmer like Meader is suspicious of any corporation which has such zealous and loyal retainers as Ham Tooting and Brush Bascom.”  And Austen thought with a return of the pang which had haunted him at intervals throughout the afternoon, that he might almost have added to these names that of Hilary Vane.  Certainly Zeb Meader had not spared his father.

“Life,” observed the Honourable Hilary, unconsciously using a phrase from the ‘Book of Arguments,’ “is a survival of the fittest.”

“How do you define ‘the fittest?’” asked Austen.  “Are they the men who have the not unusual and certainly not exalted gift of getting money from their fellow creatures by the use of any and all weapons that may be at hand? who believe the acquisition of wealth to be exempt from the practice of morality?  Is Mr. Flint your example of the fittest type to exist and survive, or Gladstone or Wilberforce or Emerson or Lincoln?”

“Emerson!” cried the Honourable Hilary, the name standing out in red letters before his eyes.  He had never read a line of the philosopher’s writings, not even the charge to “hitch your wagon to a star” (not in the “Book of Arguments").  Sarah Austen had read Emerson in the woods, and her son’s question sounded so like the unintelligible but unanswerable flashes with which the wife had on rare occasions opposed the husband’s authority that Hilary Vane found his temper getting the best of him—­The name of Emerson was immutably fixed in his mind as the synonym for incomprehensible, foolish habits and beliefs.  “Don’t talk Emerson to me,” he exclaimed.  “And as for Brush Bascom, I’ve known him for thirty years, and he’s done as much for the Republican party as any man in this State.”

This vindication of Mr. Bascom naturally brought to a close a conversation which had already continued too long.  The Honourable Hilary retired to rest; but—­if Austen had known it—­not to sleep until the small hours of the morning.