“Society’s been organized a whole lot of different ways in its time. Who tells me that it’s bound to stay this way? I tell you right now, it hasn’t got me bluffed, anyhow! My wife—if I ever have one—is going to be my sure-enough wife, and my children, my children. I won’t have a business that they can’t know about, or that doesn’t leave me strength enough to share in all their lives. I can earn enough growing potatoes and doing odd jobs of carpentering for that!”
The doctor looked wonderingly at the other’s kindling face. “Rankin,” he asked irrelevantly, “aren’t there ever moments when you despair of the world?”
The voice of the younger man had the fine tremor of sincerity as he answered, “Why, good heavens, no, Doctor! That’s why I dare criticize it so.”
The doctor looked with an intensity almost fierce into the other’s confident eyes. He laid his thin, sinewy hand on the other’s big brown fist, as though he would fain absorb conviction by contact. “But I’m sick with the slowness of the progress you talk of—believe in,” he burst out finally. “It comes too late—the advance from our tragic materialism; too late for so many that could have profited by it most.” He looked toward Lydia bending over her aunt’s fancy work. Rankin followed the direction of his eyes.
“Yes; that’s what I mean,” said the doctor heavily, rising from his chair. “That and such thousands of others. Oh, for a Theseus to hunt down this Minotaur of false standards and wretched ideas of success! I see them, the precious youths and maidens, going in by thousands to his den of mean aspirations, and not a hand is raised to warn them. They must be silly and tragic because everyone else is!”
Rankin shook his head. “I think I’m proving that you don’t have to go into the labyrinth—that you can live in health and happiness outside.”
“There’s rather more than that to be done, you’ll admit,” said the doctor with an uncompromising bitterness.
Rankin colored. “I don’t pretend that it’s much of anything—what I’ve done.”
The doctor did not deny him. He thrust out his lips and rubbed his hand nervously over his face. Finally, “But you have done it, at least,” he brought out, “and I’ve only talked. As another doctor has said: ‘I’ve never taken a bribe; but there’s a pale shade of bribery known as prosperity.’”
They fell into a silence, broken by Mrs. Sandworth’s asking, “Lydia, have your folks got an old mythology book? I studied it at school, of course, but it has sort of passed out of my mind. Was it the Minotaur that sowed teeth and something else very odd came up that you wouldn’t expect?”