"You’re not standing still," pursued Forbes: "you’re going ahead. You have a great deal to you, and Betty’s the very girl to make you make the best of yourself"—Forbes’s voice abandoned the commonplace note and fell to the note of genuine feeling—"then there’s your interest in the Business. Huber, I’ve always regretted that I didn’t have a son to leave the Business to, as my father left it to me and his father to him. If you’d married somebody else, and Betty had married some chap that had no interest in it, the Business might have gone over to you eventually, and so on to children of another stock than mine; whereas, now"—he looked around Luke to the doorway—"Betty!" he said. She had not obeyed Luke; she was standing at the door. "I couldn’t wait," she confessed; but she said it with an allegiance that was now all for Luke. "Come here," her father ordered. He released Luke’s hand and shoulder. The girl ran to him and put her arms about his neck. "Please be nice, daddy," she whispered. "Please be nice." Forbes managed to draw a handkerchief and blow his nose. "I _am_ a fool," he said. "I—Betty, you’re looking so much to-night the way your mother—By George, I _am_ a fool! I think I must be getting old, Huber." §6. In the room at the end of the hall marked "Family Entrance" to a saloon in Fifty-second Street, near Eighth Avenue, a red-headed man dressed in cheap clothes of fashionable cut, was leaning across a table at which he was drinking raw whisky with a girl who, had she not been too heavily painted, would have had a face like that popularly ascribed to Joan of Arc. [Illustration: HE FOUND IT NECESSARY TO BE EMPHATIC] "I’ve got him showed to me," the man was saying. "He lives at the Arapahoe on Thirty-ninth Street. I’ll play lighthouse. All you gotta do’s put on them glad clothes an’ get him into Pearl’s Six’ Av’nue place. He’s in wrong, anyhow. Then I’ll tip off Charley Guth, an’ he’ll put Donovan wise an’ pinch the joint. See?" The girl that looked like Joan of Arc nodded comprehendingly. "But the clothes has got to be real swell," she said. *CHAPTER X* §1. As Luke left the Forbes house that night, his step kept time with the beat of his pulses, and he walked fast. At last he thought that he saw happiness within reach. He was not yet happy; he was quite clear about this. One half of him, perhaps the nobler half, was engaged in a political battle with the forces of corruption, but it was so engaged that those forces affected it; they invaded his individuality and, therefore, curtailed his freedom and curtailed completeness. Happiness, if it was to be found at all, was to be found only in the perfect development of self, and such a development was impossible so long as self, seeking expression in politics, found expression thwarted by an evil opposition in the political field.