I
can joyously cultivate my garden, securely intrenched in the certainty
that this is the best possible of all possible worlds,"

"Oh yes--labor unions--socialism--I.W.W.," Sylvia murmured vaguely,
unable, in spite of her intelligence, to refrain from marking, by a
subsidence of interest, her instinctive feeling that those distant
questions could not in the nature of things be compared to present,
personal complications.

"No--no--!" he protested. "That's no go! I've tried for five years now
to shove it out of sight on some one of those shelves. I've learned
all the arguments on both sides. I can discuss on both sides of those
names as glibly as any other modern quibbler. I can prove the rights
of all those labels or I can prove the wrongs of them, according to
the way my dinner is digesting. What stays right there, what I never
can digest (if you'll pardon an inelegant simile that's just occurred
to me), a lump I never can either swallow entirely down or get up
out of my throat, is the fact that there are men, hundreds of men,
thousands of men, working with picks underground all day, every day,
all their lives, and that part of their labor goes to provide me with
the wherewithal to cultivate my taste, to pose as a patron of the
arts, to endow promising pianists--to go through all the motions
suitable to that position to which it has pleased Providence to call
me. It sticks in my crop that my only connection with the entire
business was to give myself the trouble to be born my father's son."

"But you _do_ work!" protested Sylvia. "You work on your farm here.
You run all sorts of lumbering operations in this region. The first
time I saw you, you certainly looked less like the traditional idea of
a predatory coal-operator." She laughed at the recollection.

"Oh yes, I work. When my undigested lump gets too painful I try to
work it off--but what I do bears the same relation to real sure-enough
work that playing tennis does to laying brick. But such as it is, it's
real satisfaction I get out of my minute Vermont holdings. They come
down to me from my farmer great-grandfather who held the land by
working it himself. There's no sore spot there. But speak of Colorado
or coal--and you see me jump with the same shooting twinge you feel
when the dentist's probe reaches a nerve. An intelligent conscience
is a luxury a man in my position can't afford to have." He began with
great accuracy to toss small stones at a log showing