"Suffered, boy? Suffered? Of course you have suffered, John," she answered, taking his hands in hers. "I have seen the furnace fires smoking your face, and I know you have suffered, Johnnie; that's why I am coming to you--to ask you to quit suffering. Look at it, my boy--what are you suffering for? Is it material power you want? Well, you have never had it. The people are going right along running their own affairs in spite of you. All your nicely built card houses are knocked over. In the states and in the federal government, in spite of your years of planning and piecing out your little practical system, at the very first puff of God's breath it goes to pieces. The men whom you bought and paid for don't stay bought--do they, my boy? Oh, your old mother knows, John. Men who will sell are never worth buying; and the house that relies on them, falls. You have built a sand dam, son--like the dams you used to build in the spring stream when you were a child. It melts under pressure like straw. You have no worldly power. In this practical world you are a failure, and good old Phil Ward, who went out into the field and scattered seeds of discontent at your system--he is seeing his harvest ripen in his old age, John," she cried. "Can't you see your failure? Look at it from a practical standpoint: what thing in the last thirty years have you advocated, and Philemon Ward opposed, that to-day he has not realized and you lost? His prescription for the evils may have been wrong many times, but his diagnosis of them was always right, and they are being cured, in spite of all your protest that they did not exist. Which of you has won his practical fight in this practical world--his God or your God; the ideal world or the material world, boy? Can't you see it?" The old woman leaned forward and looked in her son's dull, unresponsive face. "Can't you see how you have failed?" she pleaded. They rose together and began to pace the long floor of the veranda. "Oh, mother," he cried, as he put his arm about her, "I am so lonely--so tired, so sick in the heart of me."