Grant stared at the Doctor for a moment before answering: “Why, of course, Dr. Nesbit, I’ve always known that.
460“But–I–Doctor–I am consecrated to the cause. It is my reason for living.”
The day had passed in the elder’s life when he could rise to the younger man’s emotions. He looked curiously at Grant and said softly:
“Oh, to be young–to be young–to be young!” He rose, touched the strong arm beside him. “‘And the young men shall see visions.’ To be young–just to be young! But ‘the old men shall dream dreams.’ Well, Grant, they are unimportant–not entirely pleasant. We young men of the seventies had a great material vision. The dream of an empire here in the West. It has come true–increased one hundred fold. Yet it is not much of a dream.”
He let the arm drop and began drumming on the truck as he concluded: “But it’s all I have–all the dream I have now. ‘All of which I saw, and part of which I was,’ yet,” he mused, “perhaps it will be used as a foundation upon which something real and beautiful will be builded.”
Far away the headlight of their approaching train twinkled upon the prairie horizon. The two men watched it glow into fire and come upon them. And without resuming their talk, each went his own wide, weary way in the world as they lay in adjoining berths on the speeding train.
At the general election the Doctor’s law was upheld by a majority of the votes in the State, but the Doctor himself was defeated for reëlection to the State Senate in his own district. Grant Adams waited, intently and with fine faith, for this law to bring in the millennium. But the Doctor had no millennial faith.
He came down town the morning after his defeat, gay and unruffled. He went toddling into the stores and offices of Market Street, clicking his cane busily, thanking his friends and joking with his foes. But he chirruped to Henry Fenn and Kyle Perry whom he found in the Serenity at the close of the day: “Well, gentlemen, I’ve seen ’em all! I’ve taken my medicine like a little man; but I won’t lick the spoon. I sha’n’t go and see Dan and Tom. I’m willing to go as far as any man in the forgiving and forgetting business, but the Lord himself hasn’t quit on them. Look at ’em. The devil’s mortgage is recorded all over their faces and he’s getting 461about ready to foreclose on old Dan! And every time Dan hears poor Morty cough, the devil collects his compound interest. Poor, dear, gay Morty–if he could only put up a fight!”
But he could not put up a fight and his temperature rose in the afternoon and he could not meet with his gymnasium class in South Harvey in the evening, but sent a trainer instead. So often weeks passed during which Laura Van Dorn did not see Morty and the daily boxes of flowers that came punctiliously with his cards to the kindergarten and to Violet Hogan’s day nursery, were their only reminders of the sorry, lonely, footless struggle Morty was making.
It was inevitable that the lives of Violet Hogan and Laura Van Dorn in South Harvey should meet and merge. And when they met and merged, Violet Hogan found herself devoting but a few hours a day to her day nursery, while she worked six long, happy hours as a stenographer for Grant Adams in his office at the Vanderbilt House. For, after all, it was as a stenographer that she remembered herself in the grandeur and the glory of her past. So Henry Fenn and Laura Van Dorn carried on the work that Violet began, and for them souls and flowers and happiness bloomed over the Valley in the dark, unwholesome places which death had all but taken for his own.