equal--some fellow at the club once, I remember, just hit him off in a phrase which he had hunted up in the dictionary to sling at him: ‘a nugipolyloquous numbskull ’--but he knew enough to feather his own nest, and to take men as they are, and not as the Prophet Jeremiah might think they ought to be. _Don’t_ make me angry with this pharisaical nonsense! You are very young yet. You will see things differently when you have rubbed up against the world a while longer.” Seth also stood up now, with his hands deep in his pockets--a trick of all the Fairchilds when they were excited. “I have no desire to make you angry,” he answered, beginning with an effort at calmness, but soon raising his voice, “and I shouldn’t have dreamed of inflicting my juvenile views on you if you hadn’t insisted, even to the point of a threat, on my coming here. I would rather not argue the thing at all. We regard politics from totally different standpoints. I believe that your methods and aims--by ‘your’ I mean your wing of the party--are scandalous, corrupting and ruinous. I believe that if some check is not put upon the rule of the machine, if the drift of public acquiescence in debased processes of government is not stopped, it will soon be too late to save even the form of our institutions from the dry rot of venality.” “Seems to me I’ve read all this. Don’t work your old leaders off on me. Talk sense!” said Albert. Seth dropped rhetoric: “All this is very real, very big, to me. To you it is impracticable and meaningless. You don’t at all believe in the dangers which are so apparent to me. Perhaps if you did you wouldn’t care. That is all right. I have no desire to convert you, or to debate the question with you. I simply want to explain that there is no community of premises, even, between us on this subject. As for your explanation of the motives underlying the _Chronicle’s_ attitude, I shan’t contradict you. So far as I am concerned, the matter is not in argument. It is enough for me that we bolt the State ticket, and occupy the ground we do. It is no concern of mine by what path we got there.” Albert had heard his brother through with contemptuous impatience. He said now, with one foot on the stove hearth, and in a voice which, by its very coldness of calm, ought to have warned Seth of the temper underlying it: