Socrates put him to death. The world's great wise men, inventors,
scientists, philosophers, prophets, have not usually spent their days
rubbing elbows with the bricklayer. Yet these men have served their race
better than all the good-fellows that ever lived. To each his gifts. If
I succeed in reducing the principle of human evolution to its eternal
law, I need not fear the judgment of posterity upon my life. I shall, in
fact, have performed the highest service to humankind that a finite mind
can hope to compass. Nevertheless, I am impressed by much that you say.
I daresay a good deal of it is valuable. All of it I engage to analyze
and consider dispassionately at my leisure. Meantime, I thank you for
your interest in the matter. Good-evening."

"Mr. Queed."

Sharlee rose hurriedly, since hurry was so evidently necessary. She felt
profoundly stirred, she hardly knew why; all her airs of a haughty
princess were fled; and she intercepted him with no remnant of her
pretense that she was putting a shabby inferior in his place.

"I want to tell you," she said, somewhat nervously, "that I--I--admire
very much the way you've taken this. No ordinary man would have listened
with such--"

"I never pretended to be an ordinary man."

He moved, but she stood unmoving in front of him, the pretty portrait of
a lady in blue, and the eyes that she fastened upon him reminded him
vaguely of Fifi's.

"Perhaps I--should tell you," said Sharlee, "just why I--"

"Now don't," he said, smiling faintly at her with his old air of a
grandfather--"don't spoil it all by saying that you didn't mean it."

Under his smile she colored a little, and, despite herself, looked
confused. He took advantage of her embarrassment to pass her with
another bow and go out, leaving her struggling desperately with the
feeling that he had got the best of her after all.

But the door opened again a little way, almost at once, and the
trim-cut, academic face, with the lamplight falling upon the round
glasses and blotting them out in a yellow smudge, appeared in the
crevice.

"By the way, you were wrong in saying that I pulled down my blind on the
evolutionary process now going on in the South. I give four thousand
words to it in my Historical Perspective, volume one."

XIV

_In which Klinker quotes Scripture, and Queed has helped Fifi with
her Lessons for the Last Time._

The tax-articles in the _Post_ had ceased after the adjournment of