"There are," said Grace suggestively, "men enough in this valley to make about one company."
"And between here and the Arctic sea enough to make such a small army-corps of marchers and marksmen as no country has ever enrolled beneath its banner. A very little spark in the right place will kindle a great blaze, you know; but I only want to show you that the thing might have happened. I scarcely think you need expect it now."
Grace looked at him with a curious intensity. "Then," she said, "you were afraid?"
"No," answered Sewell slowly. "I was not sure I was strong enough to control the forces I could set in motion, or that the result of unloosing them would be—Utopia. It seemed too big a risk. That was one reason—you can, perhaps, guess the other. After all, one has to admit that there are certain advantages attached to the direction of affairs by the more highly trained divisions of society."
"To which," said Grace, with a soft laugh, "you, of course, belong. What made—you—a democrat?"
Sewell made a little gesture. "Ah," he said, "that is a different story, and one I hardly care to go into, but perhaps the instincts one is born with can't be entirely rooted out. I am, at least, not the iconoclast I was when I came into the valley. That, however, really isn't very astonishing. I now have a good deal to lose."
He looked at her steadily with grave deference, but as like to like, and the girl recognized this and what his words implied. She was, however, playing a game then, and another swift glance at her watch showed her that she had little time in which to finish it.
"And so, for fear you should lose it, you did not strike the spark? Well, I think that was wise. It would certainly have cost you one thing which you seem to value," she said.
This was vague, but it seemed to Sewell that there could be only one meaning to it. What he had feared to lose was not yet beyond his reach. He did not know that there were in the girl qualities which would have made her a successful Pompadour. Just then her craving for influence was irresistible; but she swept away from the topic with a swift smile expressive only of the indifference which of all the feelings that she could show he most shrank from.
"Still, to be practical, how could the blaze have spread?" she said. "It would have smouldered out in one snow-bound valley, and in the spring there would have been a very inglorious downfall to the strictly limited Utopia."