Day after day and week after week the strike dragged on. Daily strength departed from it and entered into Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. The men had embarked upon it with enthusiasm, many of them with fanatic determination; but with the advent in their home of privation, of hunger, their zeal was transmuted into heavy determination, lifeless stubbornness. Idleness hung heavily on their hands, and small coins that should have passed over the baker's counter clinked upon mahogany bars.

Dulac labored, exhorted, prayed with them. It was his personality, his individual powers over the minds and hearts of men, that kept the strike alive. The weight rested upon his shoulders alone, but he did not bend under it. He would not admit the hopelessness of the contest—and he fought on. At the end of a month he was still able to fire his audiences with sincere, if theatrical, oratory; he could still play upon them and be certain of a response. At the end of two months he—even he—was forced to admit that they listened with stolidness, with apathy. They were falling away from him; but he fought on. He would not admit defeat, would not, even in his most secret thoughts, look forward to inevitable failure.

Every man that deserted was an added atom of strength to Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. Every hungry baby, every ailing wife, every empty dinner table fought for the company and against Dulac. Rioting ended. It requires more than hopeless apathy to create a riot; there must be fervor, determination, enthusiasm. Daily Dulac's ranks were thinned by men who slunk to the company's employment office and begged to be reinstated…. The back of the strike was broken.

Bonbright Foote saw how his company crushed the strike; how, ruthlessly, with machinelike certainty and lack of heart, it went ahead undeviatingly, careless of obstructions, indifferent to human beings in its path. There was something Prussian about it; something that recalled to him Bismarck and Moltke and 1870 with the exact, soulless mechanical perfection of the systematic trampling of the France of Napoleon III…. And, just as the Bonbright Foote tradition crunched the strike to pieces so it was crunching and macerating his own individuality until it would be a formless mass ready for the mold.

The will should be a straight steel rod urged in one undeviating direction by heart and mind. No day passed upon which the rod of Bonbright's will was not bent, was not twisted to make it follow the direction of some other will stronger than his—the direction of the accumulated wills of all the Bonbright Footes who had built up the family tradition.

No initiative was allowed him; he was not permitted to interest himself in the business in his own youthful, healthy way; but he must see it through dead eyes, he must initiate nothing, criticize nothing, suggest nothing. He must follow rule.

His father was not satisfied with him, that he realized—and that he was under constant suspicion. He was unsatisfactory. His present mental form was not acceptable and must undergo painful processes of alteration. His parents would have taken him back, as a bad bargain, and exchanged him for something else if they could, but being unable, they must make him into something else.

Humiliation lay heavy on him. Every man in the employ of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, must realize the shamefulness of his position, that he was a fiction, a sham held up by his father's hands. Orders issued from his lips to unsmiling subordinates, who knew well they were not his orders, but words placed in his mouth to recite parrot-like. Letters went out under his signature, dictated by him—according to the dictation of his father. He was a rubber stamp, a mechanical means of communication…. He was not a man, an individual—he was a marionette dancing to ill-concealed strings.

The thing he realized with abhorrence was that when he was remade, when he became the thing the artisans worked upon him to create—when at last his father passed from view and he remained master of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, it would not be Bonbright Foote VII who was master. It would be an automaton, a continuation of other automatons…. It is said the Dalai Lama is perpetual, always the same, never changing from age to age. A fiction maintained by a mystic priesthood supplying themselves secretly with fresh Dalai Lama material as needful—with a symbol to hold in awe the ignorance of their religionists…. Bonbright saw that he was expected to be a symbol….

He approached his desk in the morning with loathing, and left it at night without relief. Hopelessness was upon him and he could not flee from it; it was inescapable.

True, he sought relief. Malcolm Lightener had become his fast friend—a sort of life preserver for his soul. In spite of his youth and Lightener's maturity there was real companionship between them…. Lightener knew what was going on, and in his granite way he tried to help the boy. Bonbright was not interested in his own business, so Lightener awakened in him an interest in Lightener's business. He discussed his affairs with the boy. He talked of systems, of efficiency, of business methods. He taught Bonbright as he would have taught his own son, half realizing the futility of his teaching. Nor had he question as to the righteousness of his proceeding. Because a boy's father follows an evil course the parenthood does not hallow that course…. So Bonbright learned, not knowing that he learned, and in his own office he made comparisons. The methods of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, he compared with the methods of Malcolm Lightener. He saw where modern business would make changes and improvements—but after the first few trampled-on suggestions he remained silent and grew indifferent.

Once he suggested the purchase of dictating machines.

"Fol-de-rol," said his father, brusquely—and the matter ended.

In Lightener's plant he saw lathes which roughed and finished in one process and one handling. In his own plant castings must pass from one machine to another, and through the hands of extra and unnecessary employees. It was economic waste. But he offered no suggestion. He saw time lost here, labor lavished there, but he was indifferent. He knew better. He knew how it should be done—but he did not care…. The methods of Bonbright Foote I not only suited his father, but were the laws of his father's life.

Not only had Bonbright established sympathetic relations with Malcolm Lightener, but with Lightener's family. In Mrs. Lightener he found a woman whose wealth had compelled the so-called social leaders of the city to accept her, but whose personality, once she was accepted, had won her a firm, enduring position. He found her a woman whose sudden, almost magical, change from obscurity and the lower fringe of salary-drawers to a wealth that made even America gasp, had not made her dizzy. Indeed, it seemed not to have affected her character at all. Her dominant note was motherliness. She was still the housewife. She continued to look after her husband and daughter just as she had looked after them in the days when she had lived in a tiny frame house and had cooked the meals and made the beds…. She represented womanhood of a sort Bonbright had never been on terms of intimate friendship with…. There was much about her which gave him food for reflection.

And Hilda…. Since their first meeting there had been no reference to the desire of their mothers for their marriage. For a while the knowledge of this had made it difficult for Bonbright to offer her his friendship and companionship. But when he saw, as the weeks went by, how she was willing to accept him unaffectedly as a friend, a comrade, a chum, how the maternal ambition to unite the families seemed to be wholly absent from her thoughts, they got on delightfully.

Bonbright played with her. Somehow she came to represent recreation in his life. She was jolly, a splendid sportswoman, who could hold her own with him at golf or tennis, and who drove an automobile as he would never have dared to drive.

She was not beautiful, but she was attractive, and the center of her attractiveness was her wholesomeness, her frankness, her simplicity. … He could talk to her as he could not talk even to her father, yet he could not open his heart fully even to her. He could not show her the soul tissues that throbbed and ached.

He was lonely. A lonely boy thrown with an attractive girl is a fertile field for the sowing of love. But Bonbright was not in love with Hilda…. The idea did not occur to him. There was excellent reason—though he had not arrived at a realization of it, and this excellent reason was Ruth Frazer.

He had ventured to accept Ruth's impulsive invitation to come to see her. Not frequently, not so frequently as his inclinations urged, but more frequently than was, perhaps, wise in his position…. She represented a new experience. She was utterly outside his world, and so wholly different from the girls of his world. It was an attractive difference…. And her grin! When it glowed for him he felt for the moment as if the world were really a pleasant place to spend one's life.

He learned from her. New ideas and comprehensions came to him as a result of her conversations with him. Through her eyes he was seeing the other side. Not all her theories, not even all her facts, could he accept, but no matter how radical, no matter how incendiary her words, he delighted to hear her voice uttering them. In short, Bonbright Foote VII, prince of the Foote Dynasty, was in danger of falling in love with the beggar maid.

So, many diverse forces and individualities were at work upon the molding of Bonbright Foote. One, and one only, he recognized, and that was the stern, ever-apparent, iron-handed wrenching of his father. There were times, which grew more and more frequent, when he fancied he had surrendered utterly to it and had handed over his soul to Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. He fancied he was sitting by apathetically watching the family tradition squeeze it into the desired form….

After a wretched day he had called on Ruth. The next morning soft-footed Rangar had moved shadowlike into his father's office, and presently his father summoned him to come in.

"I am informed," said the gentleman who was devoting his literary talents to a philosophical biography of the Marquis Lafayette, Hero of Two Worlds, friend of Liberty and Equality, "that you have been going repeatedly to the house of that girl who formerly was your secretary—whose mother runs a boarding house for anarchists."

The suddenness, the unexpectedness of attack upon this angle, nonplussed Bonbright. He could only stand silent, stamped with the guilty look of youth.

"Is it true?" snapped his father.

"I have called on Miss Frazer," Bonbright said, unsteadily.

Mr. Foote stood up. It was his habit to stand up in all crises, big or little.

"Have you no respect for your family name?… If you must have things like this in your life, for God's sake keep them covered up. Don't be infernally blatant about them. Do you want the whole city whispering like ghouls over the liaison of my son with—with a female anarchist who is—the daughter of a boarding-house keeper?"

Liaison!… Liaison!… The foreign term beat again and again against Bonbright's consciousness before it gained admission. Used in connection with Ruth Frazer, with his relations with Ruth Frazer, it was dead, devoid of meaning, conveyed no meaning to his brain.

"Liaison, sir!… Liaison?" he said, fumblingly.

"I can find a plainer term if you insist."

For a moment Bonbright felt curiously calm, curiously cold, curiously detached from the scene. He regarded the other man…. This man was his father. His FATHER! The laws of life and of humanity demanded that he regard this man with veneration. Yet, offhand, without investigation, this man could jump to a vile conclusion regarding him. Not only that, but could accuse him, not of guilt, but of failing to conceal guilt!… Respectability! He knew he was watching a manifestation of the family tradition. It was wrong to commit an unworthy act, but it was a sin unspeakable to be caught by the public in the commission.

His mind worked slowly. It was a full half minute before the thought bored through to him that HE was not the sole nor the greatest sufferer by this accusation. It was not HE who was insulted. It was not HE who was outraged…. It was HER!

His father could think that of her—casually. The mere fact that she was poor, not of his station, a wage-earner, made it plain to the senior Foote that Ruth Frazer would welcome a squalid affair with his son…. The Sultan throwing his handkerchief.

Bonbright's calm gave place to turmoil, his chill to heat.

"It's not true," he said, haltingly, using feeble words because stronger had not yet had time to surge up to the surface.

"Bosh!" said the father.

Then Bonbright blazed. Restraints crumbled. The Harvard manner peeled off and lay quivering with horror at his feet. He stepped a pace closer to his father, so that his face was close to his father's face, and his smoldering eyes were within inches of his father's scornful ones.

"It's a lie," he said, huskily, "a damned, abominable, insulting lie."

"Young man," his father shipped back, "be careful…."

"Careful!… I don't know who carried this thing to you, but whoever did was a miserable, sneaking mucker. He lied and he knew he lied. … And you, sir, you were willing to believe. Probably you were eager to believe…. I sha'n't defend Miss Frazer. Only a fool or a mucker could believe such a thing of her…. Yes, I have been to see her, and I'll tell you why…. I'll tell you why, good and plenty! … My first day in this place she was the only human, pleasant thing I met. Her smile was the only life or brightness in the place…. Everything else was dead men's bones. The place is a tomb and it stinks of graveclothes. Our whole family stinks of graveclothes. Family tradition!… Men dead and rotten and eaten by worms—they run this place, and you want me to let them run me…. Every move you make you consult a skeleton…. And you want to smash and crush and strangle me so that I'll be willing to walk with a weight of dead bones…. I've tried. You are my father, and I thought maybe you knew best…. I've submitted. I've submitted to your humiliations, to having everything that's ME—that is individual in me—stamped out, and stuff molded to the family pattern rammed back in its place. … She was the only bright spot in the whole outfit—and you kicked her out…. And I've been going to see her—just to see her smile and to get courage from it to start another day with you…. That's what my life has been here, and you made it so, and you will keep on making it so…. Probably you'll grind me into the family groove. Maybe I'm ground already, but that doesn't excuse what you've just said, and it doesn't make it any less an abominable lie, nor the man who reported it to you any less a muck-hearted sewer…"

He stopped, pale, panting, quivering.

"How dare you!… How dare—"

"Dare!"… Bonbright glared at his father; then he felt a great, quivering emotion welling up within him, a something he was ashamed to have the eye of man look upon. His lips began to tremble. He swung on his heel and ran staggeringly toward his door, but there he stopped, clutched the door frame, and cried, chokingly, "It's a lie. … A lie…. A slimy lie!"