"On the other hand you must justly refuse to doubt the sincerity of a few young men who have seen that reform-parties always end in violent reaction within the city and, if briefly successful, weaken the party in the next national campaign. You must refuse to doubt the sincerity of these young men when they go into the heart of the East Side to live and work among the people that make up the organization's fighting-strength. You must believe in them when they try to get nominated for even the smallest offices on the machine-ticket. And you must have faith that, if they can work themselves at last into places of power, they will reform the party in the only way that will keep it reformed." "Dear me," sighed Marian, "it seems that it was father that I rescued from a sermon." "Well," said Dyker, "you asked me why your father and I should not mistrust each other, and there you have the reason. You know what I am trying to do; I have told you my plans as I haven't told them to another human being--and you should know that I am not to be suspected." There was a ring in his voice that touched her. "I'm sorry," she said. "I beg you'll forgive me. Only really, you know, you can't expect father to be with you: he would have to break the habit of a lifetime." "I don't ask him to be with me; I only ask him to believe that a man can work with the organization and yet have pure principles." "He can't even go so far as that; he says that every system is the reflection of the men that make it, and he says that the system you support battens on horrors." "But it can't be the system. The horrors existed long before the system. Is he such a conservative as not to be able to see that?" "He isn't a conservative; he is the one unprogressive thing in nature: the liberal of a preceding generation. Only the other day I mentioned something I have been thinking about doing--something that several of my most conventional friends have been doing for ever so long--and he was so dreadfully shocked that, though I'm now resolved upon my course, I can't guess how he'll take it." Dyker's curiosity was easily piqued. "If you proposed it," he said, "I can't imagine that it was such a very terrible thing." "Oh, no; it was merely that I want to be of some use in the world and so have made up my mind to go in for settlement-work." Wesley Dyker was one of those rare animals, a human being whose parents, though they could have arranged it otherwise, permitted him to be born in New York. He had been reared, at least during the winters of his earlier life, within the Borough of Manhattan, and his views were, like those of most of his even less acclimated neighbors, just as wide as that narrow island, and no wider. Indeed, so far as were concerned his views of the proper sphere of his own womankind, he limited them entirely to an extremely small portion of the city. "Of course you're joking," he said. "I am in cold earnest," she assured him.