n a minute," admitted Rankin.

The doctor mused. "It's an interesting thought. But it's not for our
generation. A new idea is like a wedge. You have to introduce it by the
thin edge. The only way to get it started is by beginning with the
children. Adults are hopeless. There's never any use trying to change
them."

"Oh, you can't fool children," said Rankin. "It's no use teaching them
something you're not willing to make a try at yourself. They see through
that quick enough! What you're really after, is what they see and learn
to go after themselves. If anything's to be done, the adults must take
the first step."

"But, as society is organized, the idea is preposterous."

"Society's been organized a whole lot of different ways in its time. Who
tells me that it's bound to stay this way? I tell you right now, it
hasn't got _me_ bluffed, anyhow! My wife--if I ever have one--is going
to be my sure-enough wife, and my children, _my_ children. I won't
_have_ a business that they can't know about, or that doesn't leave me
strength enough to share in all their lives. I can earn enough growing
potatoes and doing odd jobs of carpentering for that!"

The doctor looked wonderingly at the other's kindling face. "Rankin,"
he asked irrelevantly, "aren't there _ever_ moments when you despair of
the world?"

The voice of the younger man had the fine tremor of sincerity as he
answered, "Why, good heavens, _no_, Doctor! That's why I dare criticize
it so."

The doctor looked with an intensity almost fierce into the other's
confident eyes. He laid his thin, sinewy hand on the other's big brown
fist, as though he would fain absorb conviction by contact. "But I'm
sick with the slowness of the progress you talk of--believe in," he
burst out finally. "It comes too late--the advance from our tragic
materialism; too late for so many that could have profited by it most."
He looked toward Lydia bending over her aunt's fancy work. Rankin
followed the direction of his eyes.

"Yes; that's what I mean," said the doctor heavily, rising from his
chair. "That and such thousands of others. Oh, for a Theseus to hunt
down this Minotaur of false standards and wretched ideas of success! I
see them, the precious youths and maidens, going in by thousands to his
den of mean aspirations, and not a hand is raised to warn them. They
must be silly and tragic because everyone else is!"

Rankin shook his head. "I think I'm proving that you don't have to go