seizes the imagination. There is a flow of new ideas abroad, he thinks,
widening realizations, unprecedented hopes and fears. There is a
consciousness of new powers and new responsibilities. We are sharing the
adolescence of our race. It is giving history a new and more intimate
meaning for us. It is bringing us into directer relation with public
affairs,--making them matter as formerly they didn't seem to matter.
That idea of the bright little private life has to go by the board."

"I suppose it has," she said, meditatively, as though she had been
thinking over some such question before.

"The private life," she said, "has a way of coming aboard again."

Her reflections travelled fast and broke out now far ahead of him.

"You have some sort of work cut out for you," she said abruptly.

"Yes. Yes, I have."

"I haven't," she said.

"So that I go about," she added, "like someone who is looking for
something. I'd like to know if it's not jabbing too searching a question
at you--what you have found."

Sir Richmond considered. "Incidentally," he smiled, "I want to get
a lasso over the neck of that very forcible and barbaric person, your
father. I am doing my best to help lay the foundation of a scientific
world control of fuel production and distribution. We have a Fuel
Commission in London with rather wide powers of enquiry into the whole
world problem of fuel. We shall come out to Washington presently with
proposals."

Miss Grammont surveyed the landscape. "I suppose," she said, "poor
father IS rather like an unbroken mule in business affairs. So many of
our big business men in America are. He'll lash out at you."

"I don't mind if only he lashes out openly in the sight of all men."

She considered and turned on Sir Richmond gravely.

"Tell me what you want to do to him. You find out so many things for me
that I seem to have been thinking about in a sort of almost invisible
half-conscious way. I've been suspecting for a long time that
Civilization wasn't much good unless it got people like my father under
some sort of control. But controlling father--as distinguished from
managing him!" She reviewed some private and amusing memories. "He is a
most intractable man."

Section 3

They had gone on to talk of her father and of the types of men who
controlled international business. She had had plentiful opportunities
for observation in their homes and her own. Gunter Lake, the big banker,
she knew particularly