“Percival, you’ve stirred this city into consciousness. It’s been wonderful how you have done it so swiftly, for it is your doing. The decent elements are marching forward into control and it belongs to you to march at their head. The thing has got to go on. If you don’t lead it, some one else will.”
“And you are going to give up?” Ellery urged, incredulous.
“I haven’t decided. Perhaps I have done with politics.”
“And if you abandon your public career, what are you going to do?”
“What do other failures do?”
“Oh, stuff!” exclaimed Norris, and began to pace the room. “Then you did not vote for the franchise because you believed in it. Somebody has a pull on you. I’d never have believed that any man in this wide world would get a pull on Dick Percival.”
“Well, somebody has,” said Dick shortly. “I wouldn’t say so much as that to any mortal but yourself. Now spare me, Ellery, and don’t carry it any further. Do you think,” he went on bitterly, “that I have not gone over the whole ground and told myself the old truths that never mean anything to you until life rams them home on your consciousness? A man may creep out from under the machinery of state law, and escape from the punishment he deserves; but from the laws under which we really live, there is no escape. It is reap what you sow; hate and you shall be hated; sin and suffer. And it isn’t as though one went out to sow. One sows perforce, every minute, whether he will or not. In some instances the reaping is singularly little fun, Ellery.”
“Well, whatever hold this mysterious some one has on you, be a man. Stand up and own yourself and let the consequences go hang.”
“I know some men could. You could. That’s the advantage of having taken a good many hard blows. You learn to stand up against them,” Dick answered slowly. “You know other people’s opinion has always been a god to me. I haven’t the strength to defy it now.”