Hilda was driving, not to her home, but to Bonbright Foote’s office.

CHAPTER XXXV

Dulac was on his way to Bonbright’s office, too.  He had started before Hilda, and arrived before she did.  If he had been asked why he was going, it is doubtful if he could have told.  He was going because he had to go ... with fresh, burning hatred of Bonbright in his heart.  Bonbright was always the obstacle he encountered.  Bonbright upset every calculation, brought his every plan to nothing.  He believed it was Bonbright who had broken the first strike, that strike upon which he had pinned such high hopes and which meant so much to labor.  It had been labor’s entering wedge into the automobile world.  Then Bonbright had married the girl he loved.  Some men can hate sufficiently for that cause alone ...  Ruth had loved him, but she had married Bonbright.  He had gone to take her away, had seen her yielding to him—­and Bonbright had come.  Again he had intervened.  And now, better equipped than for the first strike, with chances of success multiplied, Bonbright had intervened again—­with his plan.

Dulac did not consider the plan; did not perceive virtues in it, not the intent that was behind it.  He did not see that labor was getting without effort benefits that no strike could bring.  He did not see the happiness that it brought to thousands ...  All he saw was that it had killed the new strike before birth.  He regarded it as sharp practice, as a scheme for his undoing.  The thing he fought for was the principle of unionization.  Nothing else mattered; not money, not comforts, not benefits multiplied could weigh against it ...  He was true to his creed, honest in its prosecution, sincere in his beliefs and in his efforts to uplift the conditions of his fellow men.  He was a fanatic, let it be admitted, but a fanatic who suffered and labored for his cause.  He was stigmatized as a demagogue, and many of the attributes of the demagogue adhered to him.  But he was not a demagogue, for he sought nothing for himself ...  His great shortcoming was singleness of vision.  He fixed his eyes upon one height and was unable to see surrounding peaks.

So he was going to see the man who had come between him and every object he had striven for ...  And he did not know why.  He followed impulse, as he was prone to follow impulse.  Restraints were not for him; he was a thinker, he believed, and after his fashion he was a thinker. ...  But his mind was equipped with no stabilizer.

The impulse to see Bonbright was conceived in hatred and born in bitterness.  It was such an impulse as might, in its turn, breed children capable of causing a calloused world to pause an instant on its way and gasp with horror.

He brushed aside the boy who asked his business with Mr. Foote, and flung open Bonbright’s door.  On the threshold he stood speechless, tense with hatred, eyes that smoldered with jealousy, with rage, burning in hollows dug by weariness and labor and privation.  He closed the door behind him slowly.