"Don't mention it!" said Dave, graciously. "Always glad to oblige."
The consultation seemed about to end, but even at the door of the little room Dave paused to acquaint them with other interesting facts about life. He informed them that we are all brothers of the earth, being composed of carbon and a few other elements, and grow from it as do the trees; that we are but super-vegetables. He further instructed them as to the constitution of a balanced diet—protein for building, starches or sugar for energy, and fats for heating and also for their vitamine content.
The Whipples, it is to be feared, were now inattentive. They appeared to listen, but they were merely surveying with acute interest the now revealed lower half of Dave Cowan. The trousers were frayed, the shoes were but wraiths of shoes. The speaker, quite unconscious of this scrutiny, concluded by returning briefly to the problems of human association.
"We'll have socialism when every man is like every other man. So far Nature hasn't made even two alike. Anyway, most of us got the third eye of wisdom too wide open to take any stock in it. We may like it when we read it in a book, but we wouldn't submit to it. We're too inquiring. If a god leaned out of a cloud of fire and spoke to us to-day we'd put the spectroscope on his cloud, get a moving picture of him, and take his voice on a phonograph record; and we wouldn't believe him if he talked against experience."
Dave surveyed the obscure small-towners with a last tolerant smile and withdrew.
"My!" said Gideon, which for him was strong speech.
"Talks like an atheist," said Sharon.
"Mustn't judge him harshly," warned Harvey D.
So it came that Merle Dalton Whipple, born Cowan, was rather peremptorily summoned to meet these older Whipples at another conference. It was politely termed a conference by Harvey D., though Sharon warmly urged a simpler description of the meeting, declaring that Merle should be told he was to come home and behave himself. Harvey D. and Gideon, however, agreed upon the more tactful summons. They discussed, indeed, the propriety of admitting Sharon to the conference. Each felt that he might heedlessly offend the young intellectual by putting things with a bluntness for which he had often been conspicuous. Yet they agreed at last that he might be present, for each secretly distrusted his own firmness in the presence of one with so strong an appeal as their boy. They admonished Sharon to be gentle. But each hoped that if the need rose he would cease to be gentle.