"According to all political good sense and in any other times but these, when men seem to be running wild, General Waymouth was politically out of the game. It's all fine and grand in story-books, Mr. Thornton, for the hero to sacrifice everything for his ideals, but in these very practical days he's only classed as a fool and kicked to one side." "You defend Linton, then? Is that the kind of a man you hold up as a success, Miss Presson?" His grudge showed in his tone. "You will please understand, sir, that we are not discussing theories just now. This isn't a question of what the world ought to be. It's the plain fact about what a man must be if he's to get results. You and I both have heard your grandfather say many times that he'd like to play politics with angels--if only he could find the angels. It's hard to own up, when you're young, that human nature is just as it is. I understand how you feel. I know you feel it's a very strange thing for me to do--talk to you like this. But I want you to understand that my father has had nothing to do with it." He turned to her accusingly. "But I know perfectly well," he said, bitterly, "that it isn't any personal interest you take in me that makes you say it. You don't think enough of me for that." It was resentment so naively boyish that her astonishment checked her remonstrance. He rushed on. "You hold up Linton for me to follow. That's the kind of a man you admire. He's an orator, and he's smart, and he wins. I'm only an accident. You meant that when you said that General Waymouth won out only because matters were mixed up in politics. You don't care anything about me, personally. But you're talking to me because my grandfather asked you to. That's it." He guessed shrewdly. That outburst betrayed him. This young man from the north country was very human after all, she decided. "I have said before, this is a campaign of honesty. Your grandfather did ask me to talk to you. I didn't have the heart to refuse him, for I'm very fond of him." It was an acknowledgment that stung his pride. But more than all, it stirred that vague rancor he had felt the first time he had seen Linton appropriate her. He did not choose gallant words for reply. "He has set you on me, has he, to pull me away from what I think is right? He wants me to be like the rest of 'em, eh? I can be an understudy for Herbert Linton and an errand boy for the State machine! I didn't think, Miss Presson, that you--"