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 his intensity. Now he let himself drop. He allowed himself, for a few seconds, to lean and dream; and, as I gazed at him, I got an idea of the manner of the original conception of this enterprize. It had formed in the brain of this big, masterful man broken by an airplane fall. It had formed, probably, on a hospital bed when racked by pain and when his enormous, natural energies, which had found outlet through the excesses of flight, had turned inward to scheming and dreaming.

I glanced at Bane, who never looked at me. He was watching the face, the posture, the hands of the girl beside him who, now, never looked at him but at the huge, crippled man across the desk whom Bane had made his ambassador of these ideas. These were not, as I realized at the time, exactly Bane's ideas. The dreams, the schemes of the two diverged; in certain aspects, indeed, they were opposed: and the grandeur of the cripple's certainty was the greater; he endowed them with the greater dignity. This was what Bane wanted Helen Lacey to hear.

"The case of democracy today of course is