"You know, better than any one
else, I think, what the stumbling-blocks are, and who is putting them in
my way."
"Maybe so; maybe I do," was the even-toned answer. "It happens so, once
in a while, that I know a heap of things I can't tell, son." Then: "Has
McVickar been calling you down?"
"No one has called me down. But some one, or something, is keeping me
out of the real fight. I don't mean that I'm not doing what I set out to
do: I've got my own particular abomination by the neck, and I'm about to
choke the life out of it. But that is, as you might say, a side issue.
The real struggle is going on all around me, but I'm not in it or of it.
Everywhere I go there is the same cut-and-dried welcome, the same
predetermined enthusiasm. Sometimes it seems as if all the people I meet
have been instructed to make things pleasant and easy for me."
The senator's chuckle was barely audible.
"Seems as if I wouldn't find fault with that, if I were you, son," he
suggested. "You are like the boy who has found a good piece of skating
over a sheet of fine, smooth ice, and takes to complaining because it
won't break and let him down into the cold water. You'll get enough of
the real thing by and by."
Evan Blount felt his anger rising. He was in precisely the right mood to
construe the gentle jest into an admission that his father, failing to
make him a cog in one of the wheels of the machine, had gone about in
some mysterious way to insulate him--to make it impossible for him to
get into the real tide of affairs.
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