Hesitatingly he took it. As their hands met, her pulse beating against his, she lifted her eyes. And once more he was holding her close, was kissing her. And she was lying in his arms unresisting, with two large tears shining in the long lashes of her closed eyes.
"Oh, Jane—forgive me!" he cried, releasing her. "I must keep away from you. I will—I WILL!" And he was rushing down the steep slope—direct, swift, relentless. But she, looking after him with a tender, dreamy smile, murmured: "He loves me. He will come again. If not—I'll go and get him!"
To Jane Victor Dorn's analysis of his feeling toward her and of the reasons against yielding to it seemed of no importance whatever. Side by side with Selma's "One may not trifle with love" she would have put "In matters of love one does not reason," as equally axiomatic. Victor was simply talking; love would conquer him as it had conquered every man and every woman it had ever entered. Love—blind, unreasoning, irresistible—would have its will and its way.
And about most men she would have been right—about any man practically, of the preceding generation. But Victor represented a new type of human being—the type into whose life reason enters not merely as a theoretical force, to be consulted and disregarded, but as an authority, a powerful influence, dominant in all crucial matters. Only in our own time has science begun to make a notable impression upon the fog which formerly lay over the whole human mind, thicker here, thinner there, a mere haze yonder, but present everywhere. This fog made clear vision impossible, usually made seeing of any kind difficult; there was no such thing as finding a distinct line between truth and error as to any subject. And reason seemed almost as faulty a guide as feeling—was by many regarded as more faulty, not without justification.
But nowadays for some of us there are clear or almost clear horizons, and such fog banks as there are conceal from them nothing that is of importance in shaping a rational course of life. Victor Dorn was one of these emancipated few. All successful men form their lives upon a system of some kind. Even those who seem to live at haphazard, like the multitude, prove to have chart and compass and definite port in objective when their conduct is more attentively examined. Victor Dorn's system was as perfect as it was simple, and he held himself to it as rigidly as the father superior of a Trappist monastery holds his monks to their routine. Also, Victor had learned to know and to be on guard against those two arch-enemies of the man who wishes to "get somewhere"—self-excuse and optimism. He had got a good strong leash upon his vanity—and a muzzle, too. When things went wrong he instantly blamed HIMSELF, and did not rest until he had ferreted out the stupidity or folly of which HE had been guilty. He did not grieve over his failures; he held severely scientific post mortems upon them to discover the reason why—in order that there should not again be that particular kind of failure at least. Then, as to the other arch-enemy, optimism, he simply cut himself off from indulgence in it. He worked for success; he assumed failure. He taught himself to care nothing about success, but only about doing as intelligently and as thoroughly as he could the thing next at hand.
What has all this to do with his infatuation for Jane? It serves to show not only why the Workingmen's League was growing like a plague of gypsy moth, but also why Victor Dorn was not the man to be conquered by passion. Naturally, Jane, who had only the vaguest conception of the size and power of Victor Dorn's mind, could not comprehend wherein lay the difference between him and the men she read about in novels or met in her wanderings among the people of her own class in various parts of the earth. It is possible for even the humblest of us to understand genius, just as it is possible to view a mountain from all sides and get a clear idea of it bulk and its dominion. But the hasty traveler contents himself with a glance, a "How superb," and a quick passing on; and most of us are hasty travelers in the scenic land of intellectuality. Jane saw that he was a great man. But she was deceived by his frankness and his simplicity. She evoked in him only the emotional side of his nature, only one part of that.
Because it—the only phase of him she attentively examined—was so impressive, she assumed that it was the chief feature of the man.
Also, young and inexperienced women—and women not so young, and with opportunity to become less inexperienced but without the ability to learn by experience—always exaggerate the importance of passion. Almost without exception, it is by way of passion that a man and a woman approach each other. It is, of necessity, the exterior that first comes into view. Thus, all that youth and inexperience can know about love is its aspect of passion. Because Jane had again and again in her five grown-up years experienced men falling passionately in love with her, she fancied she was an expert in matters of love. In fact, she had still everything to learn.
On the way home she, assuming that the affair was as good as settled, that she and Victor Dorn were lovers, was busy with plans for the future. Victor Dorn had made a shrewd guess at the state of her mind. She had no intention of allowing him to pursue his present career. That was merely foundation. With the aid of her love and council, and of her father's money and influence, he—he and she—would mount to something really worth while—something more than the petty politics of a third rate city in the West. Washington was the proper arena for his talents; they would take the shortest route to Washington. No trouble about bringing him around; a man so able and so sensible as he would not refuse the opportunity to do good on a grand scale. Besides—he must be got away from his family, from these doubtless good and kind but certainly not very high class associates of his, and from Selma Gordon. The idea of his comparing HER with Selma Gordon! He had not done so aloud, but she knew what was in his mind. Yes, he must be taken far away from all these provincial and narrowing associations.
But all this was mere detail. The big problem was how to bring her father round. He couldn't realize what Victor Dorn would be after she had taken him in hand. He would see only Victor Dorn, the labor agitator of Remsen City, the nuisance who put mischievous motives into the heads of "the hands"—the man who made them think they had heads when they were intended by the Almighty to be simply hands. How reconcile him to the idea of accepting this nuisance, this poor, common member of the working class as a son-in-law, as the husband of the daughter he wished to see married to some one of the "best" families?