"I don't want to take it seriously. But facts are stubborn things. I am not the same man I was a few years or even a few months ago. I have lost something; I have not the same promptings; things that I used to loathe no longer shock me. New and unsuspected pitfalls open for me every day. For example, I am not naturally hot-headed—or rather, I should say, I am quick-tempered but have always been able to control myself. Yet in the past few months I have learned what it means to fly into a rage that fairly makes me see red. And there is no cause. Nothing different has broken into my life save the best of all things—a great love. And you tell me that the love is unworthy."
"No, I didn't say that; I only meant that you had misconceived it. Love is the truest, finest thing we know. It can never be the tool of evil, much less the hand that guides the tool. Given a free field, it always makes for the wider horizons, the higher planes of thought and action; it may even breathe new life into the benumbed conscience. I don't say that it can't be dragged down and trampled in the dust and the mire; it can be, and then there is nothing more pitiful in a world of misconceptions."
Again a silence came and sat between them; and, as before, it was the man who broke it.
"You lead me to a conclusion that I refuse to accept, Amy; that I am dominated by some influence which is stronger than love."
"You are," she said simply.
"What is it?"
"Environment."
"That is the most humiliating thing you have said to-day. Is a man a mere bit of driftwood, to be tossed about in the froth of any wave that happens to come along, as Freiborg says he is?"
"Not always; perhaps not often. And never, I think, in the best part of him—the soul ego. Yet there is a mighty power in the wave, in the mere drift. However much others may be deluded, I am sure you can see Mirapolis in its true light. It is frankly, baldly, the money-making scheme of a few unscrupulous men. It has no future—it can have none. And because it is what it is, the very air you breathe down there is poisoned. The taint is in the blood. Mr. Cortwright and his fellow bandits call it the 'Miracle City,' but the poor wretches on lower Chigringo Avenue laugh and call it Gomorrah."
"Just at the present moment it is a city of fools—and I, the king of the fools, have made it so," said Brouillard gloomily. From his seat on the porch step he was frowning down upon the outspread scene in the valley, where the triangular shadow of Jack's Mountain was creeping slowly across to the foot of Chigringo. Something in the measured eye-sweep brought him to his feet with a hasty exclamation: