IV
On his way to the house he decided that he could not confide even to Judge Leslie that he had been singled out as likely spoil by the "grafters." No doubt that in a way it was a compliment to his abilities, this early-conceived determination to whisk him out of the reform field and engross his abilities, killing two birds with one stone. Probably he would be approached in a similar manner very often, until he became a definite quantity, and in time would grow accustomed to it; and callous. But at present he was hot and sickened, the more so as he felt that he had received a new impulse to believe in himself. These vast corporations—the railroad, street railways, lighting, and telephone companies, were the ones that dictated to San Francisco, and were supposed to have debauched the Board of Supervisors, all of them small laborers, elevated by the Boss to serve his ends—counted their capital by the millions; in one case, at least, by the hundred million. They had already bought much of the best talent in the country, and they wasted no time on the second-rate. Gwynne could easily guess in whose teeming and orderly brain the scheme to seduce and attach himself had been shaped, and, with the American contempt for the perspicacity of any foreigner, had selected this judge, with his breezy direct tactful manner, as certain to edge the newcomer into the fold. To Gwynne the only saving grace in the whole interview was that he had not been tempted. Had he been he should have felt utterly demoralized, disposed to take himself at the valuation of the business-like unsentimental brains in power.
He found his judge awakening from a nap before his library fire and dusting the crumbs from his beard.
"This is an unexpected pleasure," the old gentleman began, then stopped short. "What is the matter?" he asked, anxiously. "Sit down."
"What does indigenate mean?"
"Why—a purely technical term for citizenship."
"A friend of yours called upon me to-day, on the strength of having known the Otises, and remarked that it was a pity I was ever discharged from my American indigenate."
"That you renounced American citizenship upon coming of age. It is a pity."
"But I remember doing no such thing. I did no such thing. I certainly should remember it."
"You mean that you made no formal act of renunciation of your American birthright, obtained no certificate of British nationality?"