had laid her low.  Now, though she was unable to perform the rite herself, she had intrusted her part to her faithful friend, Mrs. Starratt.  It was to be done by proxy, as it were, with Mrs. Hilmer carried to the grand stand, where she was to repeat the mystic formula, giving the ship a name at the moment when Helen Starratt brought the foaming bottle of champagne crashing against the vessel’s side.  The whole article, even down to this obvious dash of “sob stuff,” was at once Hilmer’s challenge to the strikers and his appeal to the gallery.  There was a certain irony in realizing that all these carefully planned effects had been seized upon for Hilmer’s own undoing.  He was working in the dark, very much as Fred Starratt had worked during those heartbreaking months when he had battled for place in the business world.  Then Hilmer had held him in the palm of his hand.  Now the situation was reversed—­he held Axel Hilmer’s fate in his own keeping, and it was his finger that would spin the wheel of destiny.  Any fool could demand an eye for an eye; so much for so much was the cut-and-dried morality of the market place.  It took a poet to bestow a wage out of all proportion to the workday, to turn the cheek of humility to the blows of arrogance, to commend the extravagant gift of the magdalene.  And it was the poetry of life, after all, which counted.  Fred Starratt knew that now.  A year ago he had thought of poetry as strings of high-sounding words which produced a pleasant mental reaction, something abstract and exotic.  He had never fancied that poetry was a thing to be seen and understood and lived, and that such common things as bread and wine and love and hatred were shot through with the pure gold of mystery.  Once, if he had been moved to magnanimity it would have been through an impulse of weak and bloodless sentimentality ... now he had risen to generosity on the wings of a supreme indifference, a magnificent contempt for unessentials, a full-blooded understanding.  Not that he had achieved a cold and pallid philosophy ... a system of lukewarm expediencies.  He could still be swept by gusts of feeling ... he could even risk his life to preserve it.

He turned the pages of the newspaper over mechanically, reading word upon word which held not the slightest meaning.  He felt Storch’s eyes upon him, drawn, no doubt, by a mixture of subtle doubts and vague appraisals.  His thoughts flew to Ginger.  What was she doing at this moment?  Was there any chance of her failure?  For answer another question shaped itself:  Had she ever failed?  Yet, this time she was beset with dangers.  And in his imagination he saw her treading the thin ice of destiny with the same glorified contempt which lured him to the poetical depths of life...  And again Monet was at his side... vague, mysterious, impalpable, the essence of things unseen but hoped for, the solved riddle made spirit, the vast patience of eternity realized.  And still Storch’s restless eyes were fixed upon him.