He could not
comprehend why the old man remained alive. He had seen many a
human being go who was in health, in comparison with this
conglomerate of diseases and frailties; yet life there was, and a
most tenacious life. He worked and watched, and from day to day
put off suggesting that they telegraph for the son. The coming
of his son might shake Martin's conviction that he would get
well; it seemed to Charlton that that conviction was the one
thread holding his patient from the abyss where darkness and
silence reign supreme.
Jane could not leave the grounds. If she had she would have seen
Victor Dorn either not at all or at a distance. For the campaign
was now approaching its climax.
The public man is always two wholly different personalities.
There is the man the public sees--and fancies it knows. There is
the man known only to his intimates, known imperfectly to them,
perhaps an unknown quantity even to himself until the necessity
for decisive action reveals him to himself and to those in a
position to see what he really did. Unfortunately, it is not the
man the public sees but the hidden man who is elected to the
office. Nothing could be falser than the old saw that sooner or
later a man stands revealed. Sometimes, as we well know, history
has not found out a man after a thousand years of studying him.
And the most familiar, the most constantly observed men in public
life often round out a long career without ever having aroused in
the public more than a faint and formless suspicion as to the
truth about them.
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