sh giant intolerable sometimes. But
his own action did not satisfy him. He had held his finger so long on the
world's pulse that affairs in New York or Washington seemed but small
matters. He liked to feel that they and he were linked by a thousand
sympathies to the chances and changes of every country on the globe. A
famine in India or an insurrection in Turkey were not mere newspaper items
to him, but significant movements of the outer levers and pulleys of the
great machine, part of which he was.

It is the straining horse that is always loaded, and there was no man in
the party from whom such work was exacted as from Neckart. The night
before he had received a deputation of French Communists proposing
emigration: this morning he was to meet in secret caucus the leaders who
would decide on the next candidate for the Presidency. So it went on day
after day. To fall suddenly into this little room, among people to whom a
day's fishing or sauntering with a dog through salt marshes was the object
of life, startled him.

For years, too, people who talked to Neckart, though in but a street
greeting, invariably recognized his power to help or harm them. If they
had no favors to ask, they bore themselves deferentially, as to a power
that could grant favors. To the captain he was still the boy Bruce, a good
fellow, though dull in Greek: to the girl, intent on her holiday, he saw
that he was an unwelcome guest, who would interfere with her journey. The
jar of falling to the common level was sudden, yet oddly pleasant.

The captain, to fill up the time, began to discuss the different makes of
fishing-rods. Mr. Neckart was used to give ten minutes each to men seeking
interviews: their words had to be sharp as arrows, and driven straight
home to the bull's eye of the matter to command his attention. Yet he
listened to this lazy talk. The damp wind drove the perfume of the
apple-blossoms in at the open window: the sunlight touched the glistening
rings of hair on Jane's throat. How slow-moving and calm the girl was! He
was quite sure that the blood had flowed leisurely in the veins under that
pearly skin ever since she was born. None of that true American vim,
sparkle, pushing energy here which he admired in his countrywomen.

"I really don't understand the new kinds of tackle," he said to Captain
Swendon: "I have not had a rod in my hand for fifteen years."

"No. Of course not. You have other work to do. But Jane and I run down