they
father great constructive enterprises; they endow great educational
systems; they build up great welfare centers; and they reach out and
touch and shape great national and international conditions. In them the
big tragedies and comedies of life--political, religious, social,
domestic--have their settings. And under the power of their combined
units empires appear and disappear. But, set in smaller font, all the
great dramas of life are printed, without a missing part, in the humbler
communities of the commonwealth. All the types appear; all conditions,
aspirations, cunning seditions, and crowning successes have their
scenery and _persona_ so true to form that sometimes the act itself
takes on the dignity of the big world drama. And the actor who produces
it becomes a star, for villainy or virtue, as powerful in his sphere as
the great star-courted suns of larger systems. Booth Tarkington makes
one of his fiction characters say, "There are as many different kinds of
folks in Kokomo as there are in Pekin."

New Eden in the Sage Brush Valley, on the far side of Kansas, might
never inspire the pen of a world genius, and yet in the small-town
chronicle runs the same drama of life that is enacted on the great stage
with all its brilliant settings. Only these smaller actors play with the
simplicity of innocence, never dreaming that what they play so well are
really world-sized parts fitted down to the compass of their settings.

Something like this philosophy was in York Macpherson's mind the next
morning as he listened to his sister and her guest loitering comfortably
over their breakfast. A cool wind was playing through the south windows
that might mean hot, sand-filled air later on. Just now life was worth
all the cost to York, who was enjoying it to the limit as he sat
studying the two women before him.

"For a frivolous, spoiled girl, Jerry can surely be companionable," he
thought, as he noted how congenial the two women were and how easily at
home Jerry was even on matters of national interest. "I never saw a type
of mind like hers before--such a potentiality for doing things coupled
with such dwarfed results."

York's mind was so absorbed, as he sat unconsciously staring at the
fair-faced girl opposite him, that he did not heed his sister's voice
until she had spoken a second time.

"York, oh York! wake up. It's daylight!"

York gave a start and he felt his face flush with embarrassment.

"As I was saying h