“It’s more complex than that,” he shrugged. “I suppose it’s simply that I married the Armond hope as well as you. Old Peter set a standard for your family which has kept you all up on your toes. If the dead see, he must chuckle sometimes over its way of working.” “Why?” she flared, letting her annoyance catch at a point of difference less vital than the main issue. “He gave his whole service to his country. He was one of the really great men of his generation, wasn’t he? You’ve never known my father as I knew him. You’ve always let yourself be influenced by the demagogic attacks on him. You’ve thought that because he made a great fortune he couldn’t be an idealist. Haven’t you seen that, if he had been a materialist, he wouldn’t have trained his family as he did? Why, it’s been his torch that I’ve tried to keep alight, and if I have done anything for you, Burton, it has been by that torch’s flame.” “You’ve done a very great deal, Rhoda,” he said. “I’m not questioning the number or the brightness of the candles you’ve burned in my game. I’m only questioning the value of the game itself. Power’s like money. If you give up all else to possess it, then it possesses you.” “But----” “I know. I should have chosen long ago. I’m not turning back now. I owe you that, I think. If I’m anything at all beyond a struggling lawyer in a little city----” He broke off suddenly as the young servant came to the library curtains. “Senator Manning and two other gentlemen,” he announced. They came almost on his heels, three men with the aspect of dignitaries: Manning tall, thin, almost cadaverous, with the eye and the hand of a Richelieu; Wilk heavy, ponderous, inscrutable as a great Buddha; Laflin, a blend of college professor and Wall Street lawyer, hiding a predatory keenness behind horn-rimmed spectacles. Characteristically, Stroude felt, they fell into place, Wilk into the nearest easy chair, Manning into an Italian seat which put him in the centre of a softly lighted stage, and Laflin back in the shadows. After a moment of casual conversation Rhoda rose to leave them. Stroude halted her. “I have an idea,” he said, “that these gentlemen have come to me on an errand which concerns you as well as myself.--Do you mind if she stays?” “Not at all,” said Manning suavely. Laflin nodded, and old man Wilk grunted assent. Rhoda went over beyond Laflin as far outside the group as she could, and just out of her husband’s line of vision; but he turned his chair a little, that he might encompass her in his sight as Manning began to speak. “It makes it a little easier for us,” he said, “that you have guessed something of our mission.” “I couldn’t help knowing,” Stroude swung back, “when every other man in the Senate has known it for days.” “Not definitely,” boomed Wilk. “There’s always talk, of course, and often more smoke than fire.”