felt that the
remark was as inane as if he had quoted it from a play. After a moment,
as she seemed to be waiting for something, he continued with greater
assurance, "I dare say they have a quality that the older generation
missed. It isn't just commonness. The modern spirit means, I suppose, a
breathless vitality. We are more intensely alive than our ancestors,
perhaps, more restless, more inclined to take risks."

The phrases he had used made him think suddenly of Gideon Vetch. Was
that the secret of the Governor's irresistible magnetism, of his
meteoric rise into power? He embodied the modern fetish--success; he
was, in the lively idiom of the younger set,--personified "pep." After
all, if the old order crumbled, was it not because of its own weakness?
Was not the fact of its decay the sign of some secret disintegration,
of rottenness at the core? And if the new spirit could destroy, perhaps
it could build as well. There might be more in it, he was beginning to
discern, than mere lack of control, than vulgar hysteria and
undisciplined violence. The quality expressed by that dreadful word was
the sparkle on the edge of the tempest, the lightning flash that
revealed the presence of electricity in the air. After all, the god of
the future was riding the whirlwind.

"I wonder if we can be wrong, you and I?" he went on presently,
forgetting the intensely personal nature of Margaret's disclosures,
while he followed the abstract trend of his reflections. "Isn't it
conceivable that we are standing, not for what is necessarily better,
but simply for what is old? Isn't the conservative merely the creature
of habit? I suppose the older generation always looks disapprovingly at
the younger, and, in spite of our youth, we really belong to the past
generation. We see things through the eyes of our parents. We are
mentally middle-aged--for middle age is a state of mind, after all. You
and I were broken in by tradition--at least I know I was, and even the
war couldn't free me. It only made me restless and dissatisfied. It
destroyed my belief in the past without giving me faith in the future.
It left me eager to go somewhere; but it failed to offer me any
direction. It put me to sea without a compass."

Clasping his hands behind his head, he leaned back against the carving
of his chair, and fixed his gaze on the portrait of the English
ancestress over the mantelpiece. The firelight flickered over his firm,
clear-cut features, ove