"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."