Luke stood erect. He folded his arms. Venable’s confession shook him, but he exerted all his strength of will to command himself. "What are you telling me?" he asked. "Are you telling me that the League has been going in for rotten work of that sort? Are you telling me that you—you of all people—have been engineering it?" Venable’s terror gave quick place to amazement. "You don’t mean to say you didn’t understand that?" he countered. "How do you suppose politics are run, anyway? Where have you been all these years under Leighton?" Anger came to his aid; his loose jaw wagged. "Don’t try to get out of this trouble by pretending you didn’t know about it. What we do, we do for the best ends, but I have always said—always—that the only way to beat the devil is to fight him with fire." "Wait, please," said Luke. "I want to get this thing straight. You say that all your reform movements have had some of this element in them?" "I say we have always fought the devil with fire." "And this campaign. You’ve used your fire in it?" "As little as possible. We never used more than we could help." "Did the committee know it?" Venable reached for the telephone. "I can’t waste time over such quibbles now," he said. "Jarvie’s arrested and we must get him out and learn the details to prepare our defense." "But the committee knew?" "Oh, ask them yourself! They have a meeting this afternoon. Of course, they knew! They have been in these fights since long before you were sent to school, and they are not fools." "You bet I _will_ ask them!" said Luke. He walked out of his office, out of the League headquarters and into the street. §2. His tired brain demanded action. It presented one picture, a canvas as full of figures as a battlefield by Delacroix. There he saw all that he had done or caused to be done: Yeates turned back to the baser cause, Nelson forced to follow, Venable facing financial disaster and soiling his old hands with crime; burglary, prostitution, and fraud stimulated to defeat him; police, city officials, and bankers corrupted to ensnare him; his little fortune, on which hung his mother’s living, imperiled; Betty imperiled, Forbes and the honorable business history of his firm imperiled; the factory’s employees fronting starvation and threatening violence; the elder political parties dragged into a repetition of their former offenses, the reform organization sharing in the evils it sought to reform—these were the present results of his endeavors to civic righteousness. Could mankind be so closely linked? Was there no end to the lives and souls that must be wronged or made wrong by one man trying to do right? He could not contemplate the question. To escape thought and find action, he went to Brooklyn. He took a taxi to the factory.