"No, no, you're wrong," said John Gano. "You're blind if you don't see the world is beautiful, is rooted in triumphing good."
Val sat up in the dark corner behind the chair, ready to cry "Hear, hear!"
"I admit," her father went on, "that man has defiled it and made it a den of thieves."
"Comes to the same thing in the end, although I don't agree—"
"It does not come to the same thing. There's all the difference in what it "comes to" between the curable and the incurable. You and I may not live to see it, but the world will one day be a fit habitation for better men than we."
Val, peering out, saw Ethan shake his head.
"When men are truly brothers, when we have worked the ape and tiger out, when we may be fortunate without blood-guiltiness. Even you," his uncle went on, a swell of enthusiasm lifting up his voice—"even you may live to see men realizing that Science is the great Captain, the true Redeemer. I should envy you your chance of hailing the beginning of that bloodless revolution, except that I am as sure of its coming as my neighbor's children's children will be when they have ocular proof and daily profit of it."
"I wish I were as sure of it as you."
"My boy, you've only to look about you. Mind, I don't say within. No, no"—his voice dragged—"one sees there one's own failures and defeats, and one is blinded to the larger good. I'm no sentimentalist, either." He flared up. "I'm not saying I shall reap any, or even you much, of this harvest. But come!"—he pulled his shambling figure out of the chair and stood before the fire almost erect—"life is nobler than men thought. Some men's share is to see, before they stumble into the dark, the light that other men shall walk by—see it, and tell the shorter-sighted to be of good cheer, for the light is at hand."