“My Lord!”
“All very honestly meant,” laughed Mary Plantagenet. “It is very charming of Alf—a nom de guerre, by the way. His real name is Michael Conner, but now he’s Alf of the Millennium. And the other day at our interview, when he came to talk of old times, somehow I couldn’t help loving him.”
“What, love—that!”
“There’s something to love in everybody, my dear. It’s really very easy to like people if you hunt for the positive—if that’s not a high brow way of putting it! The other day when Alf began to talk of his ambitions, and of the wife he had married, and of the little Alfs and the little Alfesses, I thought the more there are of you the merrier, because after all you are rather fine, you are good for the community, and you make this old world go round. Anyhow we began as enemies, and now we are friends ‘for keeps,’ and both Alf and I are so much the better for knowing it.”
“I wonder!”
“Of course we are. And when Alf is a great editor, as he means to be, and he is able to carry out his great scheme of founding a Universal Love and Admiration Society, for the purpose of bringing out the best in everybody, including foreign nations—his very own idea, and to my mind a noble one—he has promised to make me an original member.”
“A very original member!” The Tenderfoot scoffed.
But sitting there in the eye of the morning, with the gentle leaves whispering over his head, and the finest girl in the land by his side drawing a fanciful picture of “Alf” on the gravel with the point of her sunshade, he was not in the mood for mockery. The world was so full of a number of things, that it seemed but right and decent to have these large and generous notions. Let every atom and molecule that made up the pageant of human experience overflow in love and admiration of its neighbor. He was a dud himself, his dwelling-place was en parterre, yet as heaven was above him and She was at his elbow, there was no denying that the little man who had just passed out of sight had laid hold somehow of a divine idea.
Yes, the ticket for the future was Universal Love and Admiration, at any rate for the heirs of the good God. Not a doubt that! He didn’t pretend to be a philosopher, or a poet, but even he could see that yonder little scug in the brown pot hat was a big proposition.
“I wonder,” he mused aloud, “how the little bounder came to think of that?”