circus tent, so people said, the demagogue of demagogues in Stephen's
opinion--this Gideon Vetch had become Governor of Virginia! Yet the
placid course of Stephen's life flowed on precisely as it had flowed
ever since he could remember, and the dramatic hand of Washington had
not fallen. It was still so recent; it had come about so unexpectedly,
that people--at least the people the young man knew and esteemed--were
still trying to explain how it had happened. The old party had been
sleeping, of course; it had grown too confident, some said too
corpulent; and it had slept on peacefully, in spite of the stirring
strength of the labour leaders, in spite of the threatening coalition of
the new factions, in spite even of the swift revolt against the stubborn
forces of habit, of tradition, of overweening authority. His mother, he
knew, held the world war responsible; but then his mother was so
constituted that she was obliged to blame somebody or something for
whatever happened. Yet others, he admitted, as well as his mother, held
the war responsible for Gideon Vetch--as if the great struggle had cast
him out in some gigantic cataclysm, as if it had broken through the once
solid ground of established order, and had released into the world all
the explosive gases of disintegration, of destruction.

For himself, the young man reflected now, he had always thought
otherwise. It was a period, he felt, of humbug radicalism, of windbag
eloquence; yet he possessed both wit and discernment enough to see that,
though ideas might explode in empty talk, still it took ideas to make
the sort of explosion that was deafening one's ears. All the flat
formula of the centuries could not produce a single Gideon Vetch. Such
men were part of the changing world; they answered not to reasoned
argument, but to the loud crash of breaking idols. Stephen hated Vetch
with all his heart, but he acknowledged him. He did not try to evade the
man's tremendous veracity, his integrity of being, his inevitableness.
An inherent intellectual honesty compelled Stephen to admit that, "the
demagogue", as he called him, had his appropriate place in the age that
produced him--that he existed rather as an outlet for political
tendencies than as the product of international violence. He was more
than a theatrical attitude--a torrent of words. Even a free country--and
Stephen thought sentimentally of America as "a free country"--must have
its tyrannies of opinion, and con