David turned and looked hard at Margaret who had begun to be influenced by his mood. She waited, looking with averted face at the sky over the roofs of buildings. David began to talk of himself in relation to her and her mother. A note of impatience came into his voice.

"How far you have been carried away, haven't you?" he said sharply. "Listen. I am not talking to you now as your father nor as Laura's daughter. Let us be clear about that I love you and am in a contest to win your love. I am McGregor's rival. I accept the handicap of fatherhood. I love you. You see I have let something within myself alight upon you. McGregor has not done that. He refused what you had to offer but I do not. I have centred my life upon you and have done it quite knowingly and after much thought. The feeling I have is something quite special. I am an individualist but believe in the oneness of man and woman. I would dare venture into but one other life beyond my own and that the life of a woman. I have chosen to ask you to let me venture so into your life. We will talk of it."

Margaret turned and looked at her father. Later she thought that some strange phenomena must have happened at the moment Something like a film was torn from her eyes and she saw the man David, not as a shrewd and calculating man of affairs, but as something magnificently young. Not only was he strong and solid but in his face there was at the moment the deep lines of thought and suffering she had seen on the countenance of McGregor. "It is strange," she thought. "They are so unlike and yet the two men are both beautiful."

"I married your mother when I was a child as you are a child now," David went on. "To be sure I had a passion for her and she had one for me. It passed but it was beautiful enough while it lasted. It did not have depth or meaning. I want to tell you why. Then I am going to make you understand McGregor so that you may take your measure of the man. I am coming to that. I have to begin at the beginning.

"My factory began to grow and as an employer of labour I became concerned in the lives of a good many men."

His voice again became sharp. "I have been impatient with you," he said. "Do you think this McGregor is the only man who has seen and thought of other men in the mass? I have done that and have been tempted. I also might have become sentimental and destroyed myself. I did not. Loving a woman saved me. Laura did that for me although when it came to the real test of our love, understanding, she failed. I am nevertheless grateful to her that she was once the object of my love. I believe in the beauty of that."

Again David paused and began to tell his story in a new way. The figure of McGregor came back into Margaret's mind and her father began to feel that to take it entirely away would be an accomplishment full of significance. "If I can take her from him, I and my kind can take the world from him also," he thought. "It will be another victory for the aristocracy in the never-ending battle with the mob."

"I came to a turning point," he said aloud. "All men come to that point. To be sure the great mass of people drift quite stupidly but we are not now talking of people in general. There is you and me and there is the thing McGregor might be. We are each in our way something special. We come, people like us, to a place where there are two roads to take. I took one and McGregor has taken another. I know why and perhaps he knows why. I concede to him knowledge of what he has done. But now it is time for you to decide which road you will take. You have seen the crowds moving along the broad way he has chosen and now you will set out on your own way. I want you to look down my road with me."

They came to a bridge over a canal and David stopped the horses. A body of McGregor's marchers passed and Margaret's pulse began to beat high again. When she looked at her father however he was unmoved and she was a little ashamed of her emotions. For a moment David waited, as though for inspiration, and when the horses started on again he began to talk. "A labour leader came to my factory, a miniature McGregor with a crooked twist to him. He was a rascal but the things he said to my men were all true enough. I was making money for my investors, a lot of it. They might have won in a fight with me. One evening I went out into the country to walk alone under the trees and think it over."

David's voice became harsh and Margaret thought it had become strangely like the voice of McGregor talking to workingmen. "I bought the man off," David said. "I used the cruel weapon men like me have to use. I gave him money and told him to get out, to let me alone. I did it because I had to win. My kind of men always have to win. During the walk I took alone I got hold of my dream, my belief. I have the same dream now. It means more to me than the welfare of a million men. For it I would crush whatever opposed me. I am going to tell you of the dream.

"It is too bad one has to talk. Talk kills dreams and talk will also kill all such men as McGregor. Now that he has begun to talk we will get the best of him. I do not worry about McGregor. Time and talk will bring about his destruction."

David's mind ran off in a new direction. "I do not think a man's life is of much importance," he said. "No man is big enough to grasp all of life. That is the foolish fancy of children. The grown man knows he cannot see life at one great sweep. It cannot be comprehended so. One has to realise that he lives in a patchwork of many lives and many impulses.

"The man must strike at beauty. That is the realisation maturity brings and that is where the woman conies in. That is what McGregor was not wise enough to understand. He is a child you see in a land of excitable children."

The quality of David's voice changed. Putting his arm about his daughter he drew her face down beside his own. Night descended upon them. The woman who was tired from much thinking began to feel grateful for the touch of the strong hand on her shoulder. David had accomplished his purpose. He had for the moment made his daughter forget that she was his daughter. There was something hypnotic in the quiet strength of his mood.

"I come now to women, to your part," he said. "We will talk of the thing I want to make you understand. Laura failed as the woman. She never saw the point. As I grew she did not grow with me. Because I did not talk of love she did not understand me as a lover, did not know what I wanted, what I demanded of her.

"I wanted to fit my love down upon her figure as one puts a glove on his hand. You see I was the adventurer, the man mussed and moiled by life and its problems. The struggle to exist, to get money, could not be avoided. I had to make that struggle. She did not. Why could she not understand that I did not want to come into her presence to rest or to say empty words. I wanted her to help me create beauty. We should have been partners in that. Together we should have undertaken the most delicate and difficult of all struggles, the struggle for living beauty in our everyday affairs."

Bitterness swept over the old ploughmaker and he used strong words. "The whole point is in what I am now saying. That was my cry to the woman. It came out of my soul. It was the only cry to another I have ever made. Laura was a little fool. Her mind flitted away to little things. I do not know what she wanted me to be and now I do not care. Perhaps she wanted me to be a poet, a stringer together of words, one to write shrill little songs about her eyes and lips. It does not matter now what she wanted.

"But you matter."

David's voice cut through the fog of new thoughts that were confusing his daughter's mind and she could feel his body stiffen. A thrill ran through her own body and she forgot McGregor. With all the strength of her spirit she was absorbed in what David was saying. In the challenge that was coming from the lips of her father she began to feel there would be born in her own life a definite purpose.

"Women want to push out into life, to share with men the disorder and mussiness of little things. What a desire! Let them try it if they wish. They will sicken of the attempt. They lose sight of something bigger they might undertake. They have forgotten the old things, Ruth in the corn and Mary with the jar of precious ointment, they have forgotten the beauty they were meant to help men create.

"Let them share only in man's attempt to create beauty. That is the big, the delicate task to which they should consecrate themselves. Why attempt instead the cheaper, the secondary task? They are like this McGregor."

The ploughmaker became silent. Taking up the whip he drove the horses rapidly along. He thought that his point was made and was satisfied to let the imagination of his daughter do the rest. They turned off the boulevard and passed through a street of small stores. Before a saloon a troop of street urchins led by a drunken man without a hat gave a grotesque imitation of McGregor's Marchers before a crowd of laughing idlers. With a sinking heart Margaret realised that even at the height of his power the forces that would eventually destroy the impulses back of McGregor's Marchers were at work. She crept closer to David. "I love you," she said. "Some day I may have a lover but always I shall love you. I shall try to be what you want of me."

It was past two o'clock that night when David arose from the chair where he had been for several hours quietly reading. With a smile on his face he went to a window facing north toward the city. All through the evening groups of men had been passing the house. Some had gone scuffling along, a mere disorderly mob, some had gone shoulder to shoulder chanting the marching song of the workers and a few, under the influence of drink, had stopped before the house to roar out threats. Now all was quiet. David lighted a cigar and stood for a long time looking out over the city. He was thinking of McGregor and wondering what excited dream of power the day had brought into the man's head. Then he thought of his daughter and of her escape. A soft light came into his eyes. He was happy but when he had partially undressed a new mood came and he turned out the lights in the room and went again to the window. In the room above Margaret had been unable to sleep and had also crept to the window. She was thinking again of McGregor and was ashamed of her thoughts. By chance both father and daughter began at the same moment to doubt the truth of what David had said during the drive along the boulevard. Margaret could not express her doubts in words but tears came into her eyes.

As for David, he put his hand on the sill of the window and for just a moment his body trembled as with age and weariness. "I wonder," he muttered—"if I had youth—perhaps McGregor knew he would fail and yet had the courage of failure, I wonder if both Margaret and myself lack the greater courage, if that evening long ago when I walked under the trees I made a mistake? What if after all this McGregor and his woman knew both roads. What if they, after looking deliberately along the road toward success in life, went without regret along the road to failure? What if McGregor and not myself knew the road to beauty?"

END