on, glancing toward
the picture of the moor; "it's real!"

There was a hint of diffidence in Millicent's expression.

"But you can hardly judge, can you? You have scarcely seen the English
moors."

"I've spent a while on the high Albertan plains, and you have the same
things yonder; the vast sweep of sky, the rolling waste running on
forever. It's all in that picture; how expressed, I don't know--there are
only the grades of color, scarcely a line to gage the distance by. Still,
the sense of space is vivid."

Millicent blushed.

"You're an indulgent critic; that drawing is my own."

He did not appear embarrassed, though she saw that he had not suspected
the fact. She had already noticed that when he might, perhaps, have
looked awkward he only looked serious.

"After what you have said," she resumed, "I'll show you the other things
with greater confidence. Do you know, I thought all you Western people
were grimly utilitarian?"

He sat down and considered this. The man could laugh readily, but he was
also characterized by a certain gravity, which she found refreshing by
contrast with the light glibness to which she was more accustomed.

"Well," he reasoned, "in my opinion, the white man's greatest superiority
over all other peoples is his capacity for making useful things--even if
they're only ugly sawmills or grimy locomotives. Philosophy never fed any
one or lightened anybody's toil; commerce is a convenience, but the man
who makes a big profit out of it is only levying a heavy toll on somebody
else. It seems to me that all our actual benefits come from the
constructor."

"Have you been building sawmills?" Millicent asked mischievously.

He laughed with open good-humor. "Oh, no; that's why I'm free to talk. I
happened to find a lode with some gold in it, and gold is only a handy
means of exchanging things. I'll own that I was probably doing more
useful work when I stood up to my waist in ice-water, fitting sharp
stones into a pulp-mill dam."

"Perhaps you're right," Millicent agreed, "but it sounds severe. What of
the people who never do anything directly useful at all?"

"There are a few who, by just going up and down in it, keep the world
sweet and clean. Some of the rest could very well be spared."

"Then you believe that everybody must practically justify his existence?"

"If he fails to do so with us, his existence generally ceases. The
wilderness where I found the gold is full of the bones of th