Part 22

"Something's got to be done about him--eh?" observed she, in a fine imitation of a business-like voice.

"Something WILL be done," retorted he.

Jane winced--hid her distress--returned to the course she had mapped out for herself. "I hope it won't be something stupid," said she. Then she seated herself and went on. "Father--did you ever stop to wonder whether it is Victor Dorn or the changed times?"

The old man looked up abruptly and sharply--the expression of a shrewd man when he catches a hint of a new idea that sounds as if it might have something in it.

"You blame Victor Dorn," she went on to explain. "But if there were no Victor Dorn, wouldn't you be having just the same trouble? Aren't men of affairs having them everywhere--in Europe as well as on this side--nowadays?"

The old man rubbed his brow--his nose--his chin--pulled at the tufts of hair in his ears--fumbled with his cuffs. All of these gestures indicated interest and attention.

"Isn't the real truth not Victor Dorn or Victor Dorns but a changed and changing world?" pursued the girl. "And if that's so, haven't you either got to adopt new methods or fall back? That's the way it looks to me--and we women have got intuitions if we haven't got sense."

"I never said women hadn't got sense," replied the old man. "I've sometimes said MEN ain't got no sense, but not women. Not to go no further, the women make the men work for 'em--don't they? THAT'S a pretty good quality of sense, I guess."

But she knew he was busily thinking all the time about what she had said. So she did not hesitate to go on: "Instead of helping Victor Dorn by giving him things to talk about, it seems to me I'd USE him, father."

"Can't do anything with him. He's crazy," declared Hastings.

"I don't believe it," replied Jane. "I don't believe he's crazy. And I don't believe you can't manage him. A man like that--a man as clever as he is--doesn't belong with a lot of ignorant tenement-house people. He's out of place. And when anything or anybody is out of place, they can be put in their right place. Isn't that sense?"

The old man shook his head--not in negation, but in uncertainty.

"These men are always edging you on against Victor Dorn--what's the matter with them?" pursued Jane. "I saw, when Davy Hull talked about him. They're envious and jealous of him, father. They're afraid he'll distance them. And they don't want you to realize what a useful man he could be--how he could help you if you helped him--made friends with him--roused the right kind of ambition in him."

"When a man's ambitious," observed Hastings, out of the fullness of his own personal experience, "it means he's got something inside him, teasing and nagging at him--something that won't let him rest, but keeps pushing and pulling--and he's got to keep fighting, trying to satisfy it--and he can't wait to pick his ground or his weapons."

"And Victor Dorn," said Jane, to make it clearer to her father by putting his implied thought into words, "Victor Dorn is doing the best he can--fighting on the only ground that offers and with the only weapons he can lay hands on."

The old man nodded. "I never have blamed him--not really," declared he. "A practical man--a man that's been through things--he understands how these things are," in the tone of a philosopher. "Yes, I reckon Victor's doing the best he can--getting up by the only ladder he's got a chance at."

"The way to get him off that ladder is to give him another," said Jane.

A long silence, the girl letting her father thresh the matter out in his slow, thorough way. Finally her young impatience conquered her restraint. "Well--what do you think, popsy?" inquired she.

"That I've got about as smart a gel as there is in Remsen City," replied he.

"Don't lay it on too thick," laughed she.

He understood why she was laughing, though he did not show it. He knew what his much-traveled daughter thought of Remsen City, but he held to his own provincial opinion, nevertheless. Nor, perhaps, was he so far wrong as she believed. A cross section of human society, taken almost anywhere, will reveal about the same quantity of brain, and the quality of the mill is the thing, not of the material it may happen to be grinding.

She understood that his remark was his way of letting her know that he had taken her suggestion under advisement. This meant that she had said enough. And Jane Hastings had made herself an adept in the art of handling her father--an accomplishment she could by no means have achieved had she not loved him; it is only when a woman deeply and strongly loves a man that she can learn to influence him, for only love can put the necessary sensitiveness into the nerves with which moods and prejudices and whims and such subtle uncertainties can be felt out.

The next day but one, coming out on the front veranda a few minutes before lunch time she was startled rather than surprised to see Victor Dorn seated on a wicker sofa, hat off and gaze wandering delightedly over the extensive view of the beautiful farming country round Remsen City. She paused in the doorway to take advantage of the chance to look at him when he was off his guard. Certainly that profile view of the young man was impressive. It is only in the profile that we get a chance to measure the will or propelling force behind a character. In each of the two main curves of Dorn's head--that from the top of the brow downward over the nose, the lips, the chin and under, and that from the back of the head round under the ear and forward along the lower jaw--in each of these curves Dorn excelled.

She was about to draw back and make a formal entry, when he said, without looking toward her:

"Well--don't you think it would be safe to draw near?"

The tone was so easy and natural and so sympathetic--the tone of Selma Gordon--the tone of all natural persons not disturbed about themselves or about others--that Jane felt no embarrassment whatever. "I've heard you were very clever," said she, advancing. "So, I wanted to have the advantage of knowing you a little better at the outset than you would know me."

"But Selma Gordon has told me all about you," said he--he had risen as she advanced and was shaking hands with her as if they were old friends. "Besides, I saw you the other day--in spite of your effort to prevent yourself from being seen."

"What do you mean?" she asked, completely mystified.