relief from the youths who were the sons of men but who could never become men themselves. They were nice, earnest boys with all sorts of serious Marxian ideas of establishing social justice in the plants which their fathers had built; and carrying the highest motives into the city or national politics. But the industrial reformers, Constance was quite certain, never could have built up the industries with which they now, so superiorly, were finding fault; the political purifiers either failed of election or, if elected, seemed to leave politics pretty much as they had been before. The picture of Spearman, instantly appealed to and instantly in charge in the emergency, remained and became more vivid within Constance, because she never saw him except when he dominated.
And a decade most amazingly had bridged the abyss which had separated twelve years and thirty-two. At twenty-two, Constance Sherrill was finding Henry Spearman—age forty-two—the most vitalizing and interesting of the men who moved, socially, about the restricted ellipse which curved down the lake shore south of the park and up Astor Street. He had, very early, recognized that he possessed the vigor and courage to carry him far, and he had disciplined himself until the coarseness and roughness, which had sometimes offended the little girl of ten years before, had almost vanished. What crudities still came out, romantically reminded of his hard, early life on the lakes. Had there been anything in that life of his of which he had not told her—something worse than merely rough and rugged, which could strike at her? Uncle Benny's last, dramatic appeal to her had suggested that; but even at the moment when he was talking to her, fright for
