ou could supply steam, energy,
accomplishment, instead of being merely the lubrication. It's an
economic waste."

Bob left the mill-yards half-depressed, half-amused. All his people had
become alien. He opposed them in nothing, his work in no way interfered
with their activities; yet, without his volition, and probably without
their realization, he was already looked upon as one to be held at arms'
length. It saddened Bob, as it does every right-thinking young man when
he arrives at setting up his own standards of conduct and his own ways
of life. He longed with a great longing, which at the same time he
realized to be hopeless, to make these people feel as he felt. It gave
him real pain to find that his way of life could never gain anything
beyond disapproval or incomprehension. It took considerable fortitude to
conclude that he now must build his own structure, unsupported. He was
entering the loneliness of soul inseparable from complete manhood.

After such disquieting contacts, the more uncomfortable in that they
defied analysis, Bob rode out to the last lookout and gazed abroad over
the land. The pineclad bluff fell away nearly four thousand feet. Below
him the country lay spread like a relief map--valley, lesser ranges,
foothills, far-off plain, the green of trees, the brown of grass and
harvest, the blue of glimpsed water, the haze of heat and great
distance, the thread-like gossamer of roads, the half-guessed shimmer of
towns and cities in the mirage of summer, all the opulence of earth and
the business of human activity. Millions dwelt in that haze, and beyond
them, across the curve of the earth, hundreds of millions more, each
actuated by its own selfishness or charity, by its own conception of the
things nearest it. Not one in a multitude saw or cared beyond the
immediate, nor bothered his head with what it all meant, or whether it
meant anything. Bob, sitting on his motionless horse high up there in
the world, elevated above it all, in an isolation of pines, close under
his sky, bent his ear to the imagined faint humming of the spheres.
Affairs went on. The machine fulfilled its function. All things had
their place, the evil as well as the good, the waste as well as the
building, balancing like the governor of an engine the opposition of
forces. He saw, by the soft flooding of light, rather than by any flash
of insight, that were the shortsightedness, the indifference, the
ignorance, the crass selfishness t