the open door of the acuter personalities.

It was quite late, and the talk had again drifted around to a one-sided
discussion of practical politics in the Western definition of the term,
when Gantry, pleading weariness on the score of his hard week's work at
the railroad meeting, went to bed. The summer night was at its perfect
best, and Blount was still wakeful enough to refill his pipe and
well-balanced enough to be thankful for a little solitude in which to
set in order his plans for the newly struck-out future. In the later
talk with Gantry he had learned many things about the political
situation in his native State, things which were enlightening if not
particularly encouraging. Trained in the ethics of a theoretical school,
he knew only enough about practical politics to be very certain in his
own mind that they were all wrong. And if Gantry's account could be
trusted, there were none but practical politics in the State where his
father was reputed to be the dictator.

Hitherto his ambition had been to build up a modest business practice in
some Eastern city, and, like other aspiring young lawyers, he had been
filling out the perspective of the picture with the look ahead to a
possible time when some great corporation should need his services in
permanence. He was of the new generation, and he knew that the lawyer of
the courts was slowly but surely giving place to the lawyer of business.
Without attempting to carry the modern business situation bodily over
into the domain of pure ethics, he was still young enough and
enthusiastic enough to lay down the general principle that a great
corporation, being itself a creation of the law, must necessarily be
law-abiding, and, if not entirely ethical in its dealings with the
public, at least equitably just. Therefore his ideal in his own
profession was the man who could successfully safeguard large interests,