“Ah! I see. Then I, the monster, must be exposed, eh? And afterward destroyed. A very pretty little idea! And the mines and mills which I own––”
“You own nothing, Mr. Ames, except by consent of the people whom you oppress. They will wake up some day; and then state and national ownership of public utilities will come, forced by such as you.”
“And that desideratum will result in making everybody honest, I suppose?”
“No,” she answered gravely. “We must go deeper than that. All our present troubles, whether domestic, business, civic, or social, come from a total misapprehension of the nature of God––a misunderstanding of what is really good. We have all got to prove Him. And we are very foolish to lose any more time setting about it, don’t you think so?
“You see,” she went on, while he sat studying her, “those poor people down at Avon don’t know any more about what is the real good than you do. And that’s why their thoughts and yours center upon the false pleasures of this ephemeral existence called life––this existence of the so-called physical senses––and why you both become the tools of vice, disease, and misfortune. They build up such men as you, and then you turn about and crush them. And in the end you are both what the Bible says––poor, deluded fools.”
“Well, I’ll be––”
“Oh, don’t swear!” she pleaded, again seizing his hand and laughing up into his face. But then her smile vanished.
“It’s time you started to prove God,” she said earnestly. “Won’t you begin now––to-day? Haven’t you yet learned that evil is the very stupidest, dullest, most uninteresting thing in the world? It is, really. Won’t you turn from your material endeavors now, and take time to learn to really live? You’ve got plenty of time, you know, for you aren’t obliged to work for a living.”
She was leaning close to him, and her breath touched his cheek. Her soft little hand lay upon his own. And her great, dark eyes looked into his with a light which he knew, despite his perverted thought, came from the unquenchable flame of her selfless love.