nocence she had believed the voters to
perform this function. Ditmar laughed.

"Do you suppose we're going to let the mob run this country?" he
inquired. "Once in a while we can't get away with it as we'd like, we
have to take the best we can."

Thus was brought home to her more and more clearly that what men strove
and fought for were the joys of prominence, privilege, and power.
Everywhere, in the great world, they demanded and received consideration.
It was Ditmar's boast that if nobody else could get a room in a crowded
New York hotel, he could always obtain one. And she was fain to concede
--she who had never known privilege--a certain intoxicating quality to
this eminence. If you could get the power, and refused to take it, the
more fool you! A topsy-turvy world, in which the stupid toiled day by
day, week by week, exhausting their energies and craving joy, while
others adroitly carried off the prize; and virtue had apparently as
little to do with the matter as fair hair or a club foot. If Janet had
ever read Darwin, she would have recognized in her lover a creature
rather wonderfully adapted to his environment; and what puzzled her,
perhaps, was the riddle that presents itself to many better informed than
herself--the utter absence in this environment of the sign of any being
who might be called God. Her perplexities--for she did have them--took
the form of an instinctive sense of inadequacy, of persistently recurring
though inarticulate convictions of the existence of elements not included
in Ditmar's categories--of things that money could not buy; of things,
too, alas! that poverty was as powerless to grasp. Stored within her,
sometimes rising to the level of consciousness, was that experience at
Silliston in the May weather when she had had a glimpse--just a glimpse!
of a garden where strange and precious flowers were in bloom. On the
other hand, this mysterious perception by her of things unseen and
hitherto unguessed, of rays of delight in the spectrum of values to which
his senses were unattuned, was for Ditmar the supreme essence of her
fascination. At moments he was at once bewildered and inebriated by the
rare delicacy of fabric of the woman whom he had somehow stumbled upon
and possessed.

Then there were the hours when they worked together in the office. Here
she beheld Ditmar at his best. It cannot be said that his infatuation for
her was ever absent from his consciousness: he knew she was there bes