you say I should, and set out to bring the world
around to my way of thinking, where am I to begin and how?"

Simmy contrived to suppress the sigh of relief that rose to his lips. This
was making headway, after all. Things looked brighter.

"My dear fellow, it will take you a good many years to even make a
beginning. You can't go right smack up against the world and say: 'Here,
you, look sharp! I'm going to hit you in the eye.' In the first place, you
will have to convince the world that you are a great, big man in your
profession. You will have to cure ten thousand people before you can make
the world believe that you are anybody at all. Then people will listen to
you and what you say will have some effect. You can't do anything now.
Twenty years from now, when you are at the top of your profession, you
will be in a position to do something. But in the meantime you will have
to make people understand that you can cure 'em if anybody can, so that
when you say _you_ can't cure 'em, they'll know it's final. I'm not asking
you to renounce your ideas. You can even go on talking about them and
writing to the newspapers and all that sort of thing, if you want to, but
you've got to build up a reputation for yourself before you can begin to
make use of all this money along the lines laid down for you. But first of
all you must make people say that in spite of your theories you are a
practical benefactor and not a plain, ordinary crank. Go on sowing the
seed if you will, and then when the time comes found a college in which
your principles may be safely and properly taught, and then see what
people will say."

"It sounds very simple, the way you put it," said Thorpe, with a smile.

"There is no other way, my friend," said Simmy earnestly.

Thorpe was silent for a long time, staring out over the dark waters of the
bay. The sun had slipped down behind the ridge of hills to the south and
west, and the once bright sea was now cold and sinister and unsmiling. The
boats were stealing in from its unfriendly wastes.

"I had not thought of it in that light, Simmy," he said at length. "My
grandfather said it might take two hundred years."

"Incidentally," said Simmy, shrewdly, "your grandfather knew what he was
about when he put in the provision that you were to have twenty-five
thousand dollars a year as a salary, so to speak. He was a far-seeing man.
He knew that you would have a hard, uphill struggle before you got on your
feet