She displayed undeniable skill in these manoeuvres, and Dan was by turns savage and penitent. But she never gave him a chance to say what he wanted to say. Ryder made his appeal to her vanity. It was a strong appeal. He was essentially presentable and companionable. She understood him, and they had much in common, but for all that her heart approved of Oakley. She felt his dominance; she realized that he was direct and simple and strong. Yet in her judgment of him she was not very generous. She could not understand, for instance, how it was that he had been willing to allow his father to go to work in the shops like one of the common hands. It seemed to her to argue such an awful poverty in the way of ideals. The old convict was another stumbling-block. She had met him at the Joyces', and had been quick to recognize that he and Dan were very much alike--the difference was merely that of age and youth. Indeed, the similarity was little short of painful. There was the same simplicity, the same dogged stubbornness, and the same devotion to what she conceived to be an almost brutal sense of duty. In the case of the father this idea of duty had crystallized in a strangely literal belief in the Deity and expressed itself with rampant boastfulness at the very discomforts of a faith which, like the worship of Juggernaut, demanded untold sacrifices and apparently gave nothing in return. She tried to stifle her growing liking for Oakley and her unwilling admiration for his strength and honesty and a certain native refinement. Unconsciously, perhaps, she had always associated qualities of this sort with position and wealth. She divined his lack of early opportunity, and was alive to his many crudities of speech and manner, and he suffered, as he knew he must suffer, by comparison with the editor; but, in spite of this, Constance Emory knew deep down in her heart that he possessed solid and substantial merits of his own. CHAPTER X KENYON came to town to remind his Antioch friends and supporters that presently he would be needing their votes.