This thought made him
instantly self-reproachful; regretful for having shown a sort of
disloyalty by opening the door of the precious and sacred things, even
to so good a friend as Dick Gantry; and from regretting to amending was
never more than a step for Evan Blount. There were plenty of
reminiscences to be threshed over, and Blount brought them forward so
tactfully that Gantry hardly knew it when he was shouldered away from
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.
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