She flashed at him a look resentful of his complacency. It held, too, for the first time a critical doubt. There was plenty to like about Justin Merrick, and perhaps there was more to admire. He got things done because he was so virile, so dominant. To look at the lines and movements of his sturdy body, at the close-lipped mouth and resolute eyes, was to know him a leader of men. But now a treasonable thought had wirelessed itself into her brain. Had he a mind that never ranged out of well-defined pastures, that was quite content with the social and economic arrangement of the world? Did there move in it only a tight little set of orthodox ideas? “How do you know he lies down under it?” she asked with spirit. “How do we know what he has to contend with? Or how he struggles against it?” If his open smile was not an apology, it refused, anyhow, to be at variance with her. “Maybe so. As you say, I didn’t see him and you did. We’ll let it go at that and hope he’s all you think he is.” Betty, a little ashamed of her vagrant thoughts, tried to find a common ground upon which they could stand. “Don’t you think that men are often the victims of circumstance--that they get caught in currents that kinda sweep them away?” “‘I am the captain of my soul,’” he quoted sententiously. “Yes, _you_ are,” she admitted, after one swift glance that took in the dogged, flinty quality of him. “But most of us aren’t. Take Dad. He’s strong, and he’s four-square. But he wouldn’t have gone as far as he did with these tramps if he hadn’t got carried away. Well, don’t you think maybe this boy is a victim of ‘the bludgeonings of chance’? He looked like it to me.” “We make ourselves,” he insisted. “If the things we buck up against break us, it’s because we’re weak.” “Yes, but--” Betty’s protest died away. She was not convinced, and she made another start. “It seems to me that when I read the new novelists--Wells, Galsworthy, or Bennett, say--one of the things I get out of them is that we _are_ modified by our environment, not only changed by it, but sometimes made the prey of it and destroyed by it.” “Depends on how solid on our feet we are,” answered the engineer. “That’s the plea of the agitator, I know. He’s always wanting to do impossible things by law or by a social upheaval. There’s nothing to it. A man succeeds if he’s strong. He fails if he’s weak.” This creed of the individualist was sometimes Betty’s own, but to-night she was not ready to accept it. “That would be all very well if we all started equal. But we don’t. What about a man who develops tuberculosis, say, just when he is getting going? He’s weak, but it’s no fault of his.”