Helm’s smile put into his rugged face a touch of fanaticism--as tremendous earnestness is called in these days when to be interested in anything but accumulation and appetite is regarded as eccentric. Said he: “My side, as you call it, doesn’t need any players at all. It is simply--to change the figure--the irresistibly sweeping current. I am swimming with it, you against it.” Sayler surprised him by saying reflectively: “I’ve thought of that. Sometimes I believe it.” “The right thing--the thing that’s in accord with progress,” said Helm, “doesn’t need champions. The rainstorm doesn’t need umbrellas. But the men who’ve got to go out in it--they do.” Sayler was admiring Helm’s manner. It was not the manner of the condemned man--at least, if it was, it was that of a condemned man of the type that tranquilly accepts the inevitable. Yet Sayler knew that Helm was moving consciously toward one of those crises that put the souls of men to the cruelest test. Sayler understood him thoroughly now, understood the strong and tenacious emotions that lay hid, or rather lay unexposed to any but expert eyes, beneath the surface look of the homely provincial man--provincial now, rather than bucolic, as he had been when he first burst upon the astonished and amused town of Harrison, with his strange red beard, and his much-tailed cheap broadcloth. “How this man could love a cause or a woman!” thought the sentimental overlord of bosses and machines. “But,” he added, “neither is appreciative--or worth loving.” Where Sayler fell short of greatness was in that near-sightedness which prevented him from seeing the big truths that dominate the horizon of life--such truths as that the high happiness is not of the give-and-take variety but is the capacity for sheer giving. The deep and serene joy of Helm, secure from all surface storms, was the possession of a nature capable of _giving_. Helm had not accomplished his only object. He had simply convinced Sayler of his value, not in the least of his inflexibility. Sayler prided himself on thorough knowledge of human nature. Convictions were, in his opinion, merely the creatures of circumstances. Change Helm’s circumstances, change his outlook upon the world from the uncomfortable to the comfortable, and he would become a tower of strength for the existing order, for the guardianship of the masses by the upper class--a service for which the masses ought to be glad to pay with part of their only asset, their labor. At the suburban house he had taken for that legislature session, Sayler put Helm--not into the library; he was too tactful to make such a blunder as to give him the reminiscent surroundings of the previous evening--but into a home-like little smoking-room, next to the billiard room. Then he went in search of Eleanor.