defiance of all the police powers of a
great and active city. He had organized and executed with Napoleonic
comprehensiveness; he had fattened on the daily tribute of less
imaginative subordinates in sin. And now he was fortified behind his
own gold. He was being harassed and hounded for the moment--but the
emotional wave of reform that was calling for his downfall would break
and pass, and leave him as secure as ever.

"Now, my belief is," Keenan told the listening woman, "that if you find
you cannot possibly be the Napoleon of the campaign, it is well worth
while to be the Ney. I mean that it has paid me to attach myself to a
man who is bigger than I am, instead of going through all the dangers
and meannesses and hardships of a petty independent operator. It pays
me in two ways. I get the money, and I get the security."

"Then you believe this man Penfield will never be punished?"

He thought over the question for a moment or two.

"No, I don't think he ever will. He stands for something that is as
active and enduring in our American life as are the powers arrayed
against him. You see, the district-attorney's office represents the
centripetal force of society. Penfield stands for the centrifugal
force. They fight and battle against one another, and first one seems
to gain, and then the other, and all the while the fight between the
two, the struggle between the legal and the illegal, makes up the
balance of everyday life."

"You mean that we're all gamblers, at heart?"

"I mean that every Broadway must have its Bowery, that the world can
only be so good--if you try to make it better, it breaks out in a new
place--and the master criminal is a man who takes advantage of this
nervous leakage. We call him the Occasional Offender--and he's the
most dangerous man in all society. In other words, the passion, as you
say, for gambling, is implanted in all of us; the thought of some vast
hazard, of some lucky stroke of fate, is in your head as often as it is
in mine. You tell me you are a hard-working art collector, making a
decent living by gadding about Europe picking up knick-knacks. Now,
suppose I came to you with a proposal like this: Suppose I told you
that without any greater personal discomfort, without any greater
danger or any harder work, you might, say, join forces with me and at
one play of the game haul in fifty thousand dollars from men who no
more deserve this money than we do, I'll warrant t