Regis and I
planned the whole campaign this morning. Give me that kimono. Now let me
have your hand. It's not so easy to get to one's feet at sixty, Selah!"

She was sublimely unconscious of the figure she made moving across the
room with the ends of her kimono trailing back like the gray wings of
an old duck-legged hen. She gathered up some loose sheets from her desk.

"Here's the whole thing--all divided into three parts. Yours will be in
some ways the most difficult. You'll have the organizing to do among the
women in the country districts. But we've decided to get a good motor.
You'll need to cover distances rapidly. That will be one agreeable
feature at least. You and Bob Sasnett may find it convenient to do your
canvassing together!" she laughed, while Selah blushed.

* * * * *

If by some miracle a modern man should awaken some morning to find
himself thrust back a hundred years in time, although in the same place
where he had always lived, he could not believe in the reality of a
single thing he saw. Every man and every woman would be merely
characters in an historical romance. Every sentence he would hear would
sound like fiction. All manners and customs would seem exaggerated,
sentimental, and he himself would give the impression of being a monster
without breeding or a single attribute becoming to proper manhood.

If, on the other hand, he should by some incantation be projected
forward only fifty years in time, still in the place of his birth, the
effect of unreality would be even more startling, especially if those
things should have happened which prophets predict and toward which all
progress tends. Conditions would be unendurable, manners offensive. No
man would seem quite a man. No woman would seem modest. Clothes,
customs, beliefs, ambitions, and ideals would all have changed. And he
himself would seem to them a pitiable reversion to type, ludicrously
unequal to meeting the emergencies of advanced civilization. In short,
there are no lasting standards of living. Education, morals, economics,
finance, and politics are only the cards we play every generation in the
progressive euchre of evolution. The honesty with which we play the game
determines the worth of society.

At the end of a month Jordantown had not undergone so great a
metamorphosis as fifty years would make, but it was in the throes of a
frightful evolution. The changes already wrought were so amazing that