He walked out on the street, leaving them insulted and indignant. But he did not care. He was in one of his moods, in one of those momentary surges of passion that overtake the hard-pressed man. He saw everything in such moments with a distorted clarity. The motives and aspirations of such men seemed mean beyond words. If it had been possible for him to stay long at such a pitch of emotion, he would have hated them as heartily as they hated him. They did hate him. Chiefly because they distrusted him, because they couldn't understand his motives. For a long time they had believed that he was a fool about money, a sentimentalist who was sinking a great fortune into a bottomless pit. Then because they saw no sign of collapse, they credited him with ambitious schemes which aroused their cupidity, and finally their antagonism when he continued to play a lone hand and succeed where they, with their little combinations, either failed or were afraid to run a risk of failing. He would enter no arrangement designed to put labor in its place. He would have nothing to do with employers' associations. He stood out a lone figure, carrying on his shoulders the burden of the Norquay Trust and in his hands a producing organization whose efficiency they envied and could not duplicate by their methods. All that winter Rod heard hints, snatches of conversation; he watched, listened, made mental notes. He heard the complaining of the pinched industrial barons. They blamed the war now. _C'est la guerre!_ But it was not the war. They were reaping, all civilization was reaping, only seed that had been sown long before the war. The worthy bourgeois learned nothing; but he did forget many things. Chiefly he forgot, or perhaps had never learned, that the war did not create greed, ineptitude, blundering, injustice; the war didn't endow man with a tendency to snatch at chestnuts in the fire and complain loudly when he burned his fingers. It seemed to Rod utterly childish to blame the war for individual or even national folly. The war had its own burden of iniquity to bear. The war created nothing and destroyed nothing that had its root in the human heart. At the worst it had only deflected certain things, released pent forces and passions. He considered. Grove would have made as great a mess of his ambitious schemes if no cannon had waked echoes in Flanders. He had been a victim of his own weakness. A weak, vain man with great power in his hands, and a group of strong, predatory men filching it from him on the old principle that "he shall take who has the power and he shall keep who can." This was the law that seemed to rule modern industrial society. Right has always rested on power; it cannot be otherwise. Very well then. Let them live by the law. Rod could not help a sneer when he saw these aspiring minor plutocrats wince as the shoe pinched them; the shoe which they would have fitted on other feet without a qualm, if they could.