e of this little
ant of a man is not. It's insignificant."

"That's a dangerous state of mind to be in, Dick," said Lenox.

"And after all, you can't help being a very important thing to
yourself," said Madeline. "And it must be of eternal significance to you
whether your soul is walking with the centuries or against them."

"My dear Madeline," answered Dick, "when I am with you and such as you
who live on a little remote mountain, eternity seems a very important
matter; but when I am with most people, next Wednesday, when taxes are
due, looms up and shuts out eternity. And you will permit me to think
that you women who are sheltered and who sit with the good things of
life heaped about you, don't know very much about practical conditions."

"But why isn't my conscience as practical as my clothes?" persisted
Madeline. "And why is the fortune made to-day in Montana mines and lost
to-morrow in Wall Street any more practical than this same majestic
march of the centuries and the great thoughts that circle about it?
'Practical' is such a foolish word, Dick."

"Undoubtedly, to you," said Dick with a little sneer. "But to most of
the race to which we have the honor to belong it is the word that makes
the dictionary heavy. It is because you do not know its meaning that you
women, or perhaps I ought to use the despised term, 'ladies,' become the
very beautiful and useless articles that you are--works of art, which
may thrill and charm a man for a moment, when he has time to look at
them, but which bear little relation to the stress of life which you can
not comprehend."

"Dick!" Madeline spoke almost with tears in her eyes. "It is not like
you to have a fling at women."

"You see I'm gathering wisdom as I go along."

"Gathering idiocy, you mean," interposed Mr. Lenox. "Dick, you young
fool, the ideal woman is the goal toward which the rest of humanity must
run; and the sooner you bend all your practical faculties in that
direction, and there abase the knee, the better for you."

He nodded down the table toward his wife, and she pursed up her lips and
said, "You nice goose! That's the way to keep us sweet-tempered."

"I hope you're not going to turn cynic, Dick," said Ellery. "The role
does not fit you."

"A cynic," interposed Mrs. Lenox, "always thinks that he has discovered
the sourness of the world. In reality all he has found is his own bad
digestion. I should hate to think there was anything on my table to
caus