"What an interesting lot we women must be in your eyes," broke in Bessie, digressing from the subject. Captain Forest smiled.
"Don't misunderstand me," he went on. "You are trumps, every one of you, if you only knew it, but unfortunately you do not. You are the most attractive women in the world, but you are spoiled—utterly spoiled. You are the well-groomed, lovely curled and pampered darlings of society, but alas! utterly superficial, just like those brilliant women of the great French revolutionary period."
"I admire your frankness, Jack; but what do you really intend doing? What sort of a life do you intend to lead?" asked Blanch.
"Cease chasing will-o'-the-wisps about in the vain pursuit of happiness, and live as man was intended to live by substituting nature's realities for man's creations; those things which we prize most—which please for a time, but which in the end leave us as empty handed as the day we first started in quest of the golden fleece. Live as close as possible to nature; cultivate the soil, watch the fruit and the flowers and the grain grow, and roam throughout the length and breadth of the land when the longing seizes me."
"What!" cried the Colonel, unable to contain himself any longer. "Is this the inane, prosaic existence for which you have given up one of the most brilliant careers the world had to offer a man? It's bad enough to have wrecked that, but for one possessing the wealth you do to waste his life after such fashion; it's simply disgusting! Think of what you might do in the financial world!"
"That's just the sort of answer one might expect from you," replied the Captain, taking a fresh pull at his cigarette. "You talk like a stockbroker. That phase of labor brings no real happiness to any one. Besides, it would be absurd for one possessing the money I do to spend his days earning more. Of course as things are constituted to-day, it is difficult to get along without money, but in reality I don't consider it has anything to do with happiness. Lasting pleasure and peace can only be found in the verities of nature; her beauties and realities are the only satisfying and enduring things.
"What can you who pass your days amid the noise and dirt of cities, breathing their tainted atmosphere, and your intellects nourished upon artificialities and the creations of men's minds, know of nature? How many of you have ever gazed long enough at the stars to appreciate their beauty and mystery, or listened to the sound of the wind and tried to guess its meaning?"
"Bah! you are as sentimental as a school-girl!" ejaculated the Colonel. "You talk like one who has just taken a short course in Thoreau or Rousseau."
The Captain only laughed in return. He rose from his seat and began striding up and down before them with his hands clasped behind his back and his gaze fixed on the ground.
"Who are you," he continued passionately, stopping abruptly before them, "to assume that others should live according to your lackadaisical, sensuous sentimentality—your divan, boudoir conceptions of life? Thoreau and Rousseau and Emerson and Ruskin were great men, but had they talked less and actually lived out the life they preached, the world might possibly have been aroused to a consciousness of something higher by this time; but they were too small for the task. It requires a man cast in a bigger mold to perform the work—it is only in men like me that the future hope of the race lies. I must live the life they preached. Do you understand? Why, I could crush you and the world you represent in the hollow of my hand! You seek happiness in the evanescent wine and laughter of the illusive, superficial life. I, too, sought it there, but like you, I did not find it."