ers take care of this
extracting. Then this money's to be fought for, by the people engaged in
the process, as wolves fight over the carcass of the deer they have
brought down together. This is the fight between the directors of labor
and the working-men. It's ridiculous to hold that such a wasteful and
incoherent system is the only one that will arouse men's energies enough
to get them into action. It's absurd to think that business men . . .
they're the flower of the nation, they're America's specialty, you know
. . . can only find their opportunity for service to their fellow-men by
such haphazard contracts with public service as helping raise money for
a library or heading a movement for better housing of the poor, when
they don't know anything about the housing of the poor, nor what it
ought to be. Their opportunity for public service is right in their own
legitimate businesses, and don't you forget it. Everybody's business is
his best way to public service, and doing it that way, you'd put out of
operation the professional uplifters who uplift as a business, and can't
help being priggish and self-conscious about it. It makes me tired the
way professional idealists don't see their big chance. They'll take all
the money they can get from business for hospitals, and laboratories,
and to investigate the sleeping sickness or the boll-weevil, but that
business itself could rank with public libraries and hospitals as an
ideal element in the life on the globe . . . they can't open their minds
wide enough to take in that."

Mr. Welles had been following this with an almost painful interest and
surprise. He found it very agitating, very upsetting. Suppose there had
been something there, all the time. He must try to think it out more.
Perhaps it was not true. But here sat a man who had made it work. Why
hadn't he thought of it in time? Now it was too late. Too late for him
to do anything. Anything? The voice of the man beside him grew dim to
him, as, uneasy and uncertain, his spirits sank lower and lower. Suppose
all the time there had been a way out besides beating the retreat to the
women, the children, and the gardens? Only now it was too late! What was
the use of thinking of it all?

For a moment he forgot where he was. It seemed to him that there was
something waiting for him to think of it . . .

But oddly enough, all that presented itself to him, when he tried to
look, was the story that had nothing to do with anyth