Sense of Decency, Good Form, Breeding, etc.: Candidates shall not vote for themselves; nor stump the valley proclaiming at the top of their lungs that they alone can keep the country from going to the dogs.
Fondness for an Occasional Glass of Champagne: How about liquor?
Self-control: If everybody else will do without it, I will.
Human Nature: We must encourage early marriages.
Ego: Of course, you exempt yourself.
Whole System of Nerves and Circulation: I do not!
Fastidiousness: She must be so and so and so (but he only succeeded in conjuring up a vague shadow of a girl).
Beginning like this (or something like it), deliberately, and thinking up things as he went along, the Poor Boy's imagination suddenly stepped in and took such a terrific grip of the situation that little by little the idea of a model settlement became as real as the most vivid and logical dream.
The valley was under three feet of snow. There was four feet of snow upon the surrounding hills and mountains, but already the engineers, headed by the Poor Boy, had been at work, and the masons and the carpenters. And many miles of ditches had been dug, and dams built, and a powerhouse, and roads (always among trees—so that the natural beauty of the valley was not so much as scratched), and already the village was complete, with its white houses and white school (with its longer holidays and more of them), its white library with the long lovely colonnade, commission house facing it, gardens in front of every dwelling, and pairs of lovers strolling by Placid Brook.
Furthermore the village was full of people already, and half a dozen of them had been so clearly designed by the Poor Boy's imagination that he could see them, every line of their faces, every detail of their clothes. He knew every intonation of their voices. When he talked with them, he did not have to make up their answers—they just came. And better, other people, at first dim figureheads, were becoming clearer and more vivid all the time, so it seemed sure that before long he would know even the dogs of his settlement by sight.