is exactly what has happened in the passage of this
bill. I venture to say that not one man in ten who voted for it had the
faintest suspicion that it was a 'graft'."

"If that be true, what chances there are for men with the gift of true
leadership and a love of pure justice in their hearts!" she said
half-absently; and he started forward and said: "I beg pardon?"

She let the blue-gray eyes meet his and there was a passing shadow of
disappointment in them.

"I ought to beg yours. I'm afraid I was thinking aloud. But it is one of
my dreams. If I were a man I should go into politics."

"To purify them?"

"To do my part in trying. The great heart of the people is honest and
well-meaning: I think we all admit that. And there is intelligence, too.
But human nature is the same as it used to be when they set up a man who
_could_ and called him a king. Gentle or simple, it must be led."

"There is no lack of leadership, such as it is," he hazarded.

"No; but there seems to be a pitiful lack of the right kind: men who will
put self-seeking and unworthy ambition aside and lift the standard of
justice and right-doing for its own sake. Are there any such men
nowadays?"

"I don't know," he rejoined gravely. "Sometimes I'm tempted to doubt it.
It is a frantic scramble for place and power for the most part. The kind
of man you have in mind isn't in it; shuns it as he would a plague spot."

She contradicted him firmly.

"No, the kind of man I have in mind wouldn't shun it; he would take hold
with his hands and try to make things better; he would put the selfish
temptations under foot and give the people a leader worth following--be
the real mind and hand of the well-meaning majority."

Kent shook his head slowly.

"Not unless we admit a motive stronger than the abstraction which we call
patriotism."

"I don't understand," she said; meaning, rather, that she refused to
understand.

"I mean that such a man, however exalted his views might be, would have to
have an object more personal to him than the mere dutiful promptings of
patriotism to make him do his best."

"But that would be self-seeking again."

"Not necessarily in the narrow sense. The old knightly chivalry was a
beautiful thing in its way, and it gave an uplift to an age which would
have been frankly brutal without it: yet it had its well-spring in what
appeals to us now as being a rather fantastic sentiment."

"And we are not sentimentalists?" she sugge