“I’ve spent a while on the high Albertan plains, and you have the same things yonder; the vast sweep of sky, the rolling waste running on forever. It’s all in that picture; how expressed, I don’t know—there are only the grades of color, scarcely a line to gage the distance by. Still, the sense of space is vivid.”
Millicent blushed.
“You’re an indulgent critic; that drawing is my own.”
He did not appear embarrassed, though she saw that he had not suspected the fact. She had already noticed that when he might, perhaps, have looked awkward he only looked serious.
“After what you have said,” she resumed, “I’ll show you the other things with greater confidence. Do you know, I thought all you Western people were grimly utilitarian?”
He sat down and considered this. The man could laugh readily, but he was also characterized by a certain gravity, which she found refreshing by contrast with the light glibness to which she was more accustomed.
“Well,” he reasoned, “in my opinion, the white man’s greatest superiority over all other peoples is his capacity for making useful things—even if they’re only ugly sawmills or grimy locomotives. Philosophy never fed any one or lightened anybody’s toil; commerce is a convenience, but the man who makes a big profit out of it is only levying a heavy toll on somebody else. It seems to me that all our actual benefits come from the constructor.”
“Have you been building sawmills?” Millicent asked mischievously.
He laughed with open good-humor. “Oh, no; that’s why I’m free to talk. I happened to find a lode with some gold in it, and gold is only a handy means of exchanging things. I’ll own that I was probably doing more useful work when I stood up to my waist in ice-water, fitting sharp stones into a pulp-mill dam.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” Millicent agreed, “but it sounds severe. What of the people who never do anything directly useful at all?”