Was that the secret of the Governor's irresistible magnetism, of his meteoric rise into power?
He embodied the modern fetish--success; he was, in the lively idiom of the younger set,--personified "pep." After all, if the old order crumbled, was it not because of its own weakness?
Was not the fact of its decay the sign of some secret disintegration, of rottenness at the core?
And if the new spirit could destroy, perhaps it could build as well.

There might be more in it, he was beginning to discern, than mere lack of control, than vulgar hysteria and undisciplined violence.

The quality expressed by that dreadful word was the sparkle on the edge of the tempest, the lightning flash that revealed the presence of electricity in the air.

After all, the god of the future was riding the whirlwind.
"I wonder if we can be wrong, you and I ?" he went on presently, forgetting the intensely personal nature of Margaret's disclosures, while he followed the abstract trend of his reflections.

"Isn't it conceivable that we are standing, not for what is necessarily better, but simply for what is old?
Isn't the conservative merely the creature of habit?
I suppose the older generation always looks disapprovingly at the younger, and, in spite of our youth, we really belong to the past generation.