ving the life I want to live."

"I do. Until you get this thing out of your system--"

"What thing?" I, too, leaned forward. The tone of his voice made
something in me flare. "What thing?" I repeated.

Selwyn's shoulders shrugged slightly. He sat up, then leaned back,
his hands in his pockets. "Why discuss it? You've long wanted to do
something of this sort. Until it was done you would never be
content. What you want to do, I doubt if you know yourself. Are you
slumming? Uplifting?"

"I am not. I'm neither a slummer nor an uplifter. A slummer helps.
I'm just looking on." I threw the cushion behind me to the other end
of the sofa. "I thought it might be interesting to see for myself
some of the causes which produce conditions. I've read a good deal,
but one doesn't exactly sense things by reading. I want to see."

"And after you see?" Selwyn made an impatient movement with his
hand. "A thousand years from now humanity may get results from
scientific management in social organization, but most of your
present-day methods are about as practical as trying to empty the
ocean with a teaspoon or to pick a posy out of swamp grass."

"What do you know of present-day methods?"

"Very little. Beating the air doesn't interest me. Most people seem
to forget the processes of nature; seem to imagine that certain
things can be brought to pass quickly which can only be accomplished
slowly. From the first struggle of the human race to stand upright,
to articulate, to find food, to strike fire, to paddle in water, to
wear covering, to forage, explore-- What is the matter?"

"Nothing." I leaned back in the corner of the sofa, my hands, palms
upward, in my lap, my eyes on them that he might not see their
smiling. "I was just wondering what that had to do with certain
present-day conditions, certain injustices and inequalities,
certain--"

"It explains them to some extent. From the earliest days of dawning
thought, from the first efforts at self-expression, humanity has
grouped itself not only into families, tribes, communities, nations,
or what you will, but in each of these divisions there have ever been
subdivisions. Ignorance and knowledge, strength and weakness, power
and incapacity, find their level, rise or fall according to their
proper place. If you have any little dreams of making all human
beings after one pattern--"

"I haven't. It would be as uninteresting as impossible. But it is
queer