"Won't the automobile manufacturers see that, too?" she asked. "Won't the men have all their power and wealth to fight?"
Dulac shrugged his shoulders. "I guess the automobile world knows who
Dulac is to-night," he said, with gleaming eyes.
Somehow the boast became the man. It was perfectly in character with his appearance, with his bearing. It did not impress Ruth as a brag; it seemed a natural and ordinary thing for him to say.
"You've been here just two weeks," she said, a trifle breathlessly; for he loomed big to her girlish eyes. "You've done all this in two weeks."
He received the compliment indifferently. Perhaps that was a pose; perhaps the ego of the man made him impervious even to compliments. There are men so confident in their powers that a compliment always falls short of their own estimate of themselves.
"It's a start—but all our work is only a start. It's preliminary," His voice became oratorical. "First we must unionize the world. Now there are strong unions and weak unions—both arrayed against a capital better organized and stronger than ever before in the world's history. Unionism is primary instruction in revolution. We must teach labor its power, and it is slow to learn. We must prepare, prepare, prepare, and when all is ready we shall rise. Not one union, not the unions of a state, of a country, but the unions of the world…hundreds of millions of men who have been ground down by aristocracies and wealth for generations. Then we shall have such an overturning as shall make the French Revolution look like child's play….A World's Republic—that's our aim; a World's Republic ruled by labor!"
Her eyes glistened as he talked; she could visualize his vision, could see a united world, cleansed of wars, of boundary lines; a world where every man's chance of happiness was the equal of every other man's chance; where wealth and poverty were abolished, from which slums, degradation, starvation, the sordid wickednesses compelled by poverty, should have vanished. She could see a world of peace, plenty, beauty.
It was for this high aim that Dulac worked. His stature increased. She marveled that such a man could waste his thoughts upon her. She idealized him; her soul prostrated itself before him.
So much of accomplishment lay behind him—and he not yet thirty years old! The confidence reposed in him by labor was eloquently testified to by the sending of him to this important post on the battle line. Already he had justified that confidence. With years and experience what heights might he not climb!…This was Ruth's thought. Beside Dulac's belief in himself and his future it was colorless.
Dulac had been an inmate of the Frazer cottage two weeks. In that time he had not once stepped out of his character. If his attitude toward the world were a pose it had become so habitual as to require no objective prompting or effort to maintain. This character was that of the leader of men, the zealot for the cause of the under dog. It held him aloof from personal concerns. Individual affairs did not touch him, but functioned unnoticed on a plane below his clouds. Not for an instant had he sought the friendship of Ruth and her mother, not to establish relations of friendship with them. He was devoted to a cause, and the cause left no room in his life for smaller matters. He was a man apart.