try to sink individual ambition, it is
now."

"Gwynne!" said Colton, abruptly. "What in thunder does it all amount to,
anyhow? What difference does it make--will it make a thousand years
hence--that you and I are sitting here on the very edge of creation,
solemnly discussing the rottenest subject of our little time--American
politics? What's the use of the socialists frothing, and nations trying
to overturn one another? I had rather die on the spot than that the
United States should be conquered for five minutes by Japan or any other
Asiatic power, although I could endure the victory of a people that I
recognized as our equals. Why are instincts planted so strongly? There
may be a reason for a few years; but that's just it, a few mean little
years and it is all over. What difference does anything really make, so
long as we are comfortable? Everything else, every other instinct, is
artificial. My wife is a religious little body and believes in reward
and punishment hereafter, that we must spend at least a certain part of
our time in this life preparing for the next. I'd like to believe the
same, not only to please her, but because I could look forward to
meeting my child again; but, somehow, I can't. The present has always
been about as much as I could tackle. And I fancy that when I'm through
with it, I won't want any more. But although the present whirls so fast
that I don't have time for the sort of thinking intellectual people like
you and Isabel do, still it does sometimes dash across my mind--that
question: 'What is it all for? And why do we sweat through life for what
amounts to exactly nothing in the end?'"

"You cannot be sure it amounts to nothing. Sometimes I have the fancy
that the entire round globe has just one inhabitant, of which we merely
appear to be individual manifestations: that we are, in fact, a part of
the earth herself, and she absorbs and casts us forth again, as she
rushes along to her own destiny as sentient as ourselves. All the
planets are alive in the same way, and they are all racing to see which
will make the greatest showing on what we call down here the Judgment
Day--that is to say, which shall have produced the most balanced and
perfected being; which shall have whirled away the most original sin and
sifted out a man, great and good without self-righteousness--to my mind
the worst of mortal failings because its correlative, injustice, is the
source of most of the unhappiness. That wil