“Can nothing change you? Must you always have your own way?” she added, still refusing to look at him.
“It is not true, Sue, that I always want my own way, and people do change me; you have changed me,” he said.
She shook her head.
“No, I have not changed you. I found you hungry for something and you thought I could feed it. I gave you an idea that you took hold of and made your own. I do not know where I got it, from some book or hearing some one talk, I suppose. But it belonged to you. You built it and fostered it in me and coloured it with your own personality. It is your idea to-day. It means more to you than all this firearms trust that the papers are full of.”
She turned to look at him, and put out her hand and laid it in his.
“I have not been brave,” she said. “I am standing in your way. I have had a hope that we would get back to each other. I should have freed you but I hadn’t the courage, I hadn’t the courage. I could not give up the dream that some day you would really take me back to you.”
Getting out of her chair she dropped to her knees and putting her head in his lap, shook with sobs. Sam sat stroking her hair. Her agitation was so great that her muscular little back shook with it.
Sam looked past her at the fire and tried to think clearly. He was not greatly moved by her agitation, but with all his heart he wanted to think things out and get at the right and the honest thing to do.
“It is a time of big things,” he said slowly and with an air of one explaining to a child. “As your socialists say, vast changes are going on. I do not believe that your socialists really sense what these changes mean, and I am not sure that I do or that any man does, but I know they mean something big and I want to be in them and a part of them; all big men do; they are struggling like chicks in the shell. Why, look here! What I am doing has to be done and if I do not do it another man will. The colonel has to go. He will be swept aside. He belongs to something old and outworn. Your socialists, I believe, call it the age of competition.”
“But not by us, not by you, Sam,” she plead. “After all, he is my father.”