“Why the wrong one?” demanded Ray, with an obscure discomfort.
“Well, I don’t know! But if it isn’t evident to you that Mrs. Denton is hardly fitted to be the guide, philosopher, and friend of such a man”—
Ray would not pursue this branch of the inquiry. “His notion of what the world wanted was to have its cities eliminated. Then he thought it would be all serene.”
“Ah, that wouldn’t do,” said Kane. “Cities are a vice, but they are essential to us now. We could not live without them; perhaps we are to be saved by them. But it is well to return to Nature from time to time.”
“I thought I heard you saying some rather disparaging things of Nature a little while ago,” said Ray, with a remaining grudge against Kane, and with a young man’s willingness to convict his elder of any inconsistency, serious or unserious.
“Oh, primeval Nature, yes. But I have nothing but praise for this kind—the kind that man controls and guides. It is outlaw Nature that I object to, the savage survival from chaos, the mother of earthquakes and cyclones, blizzards and untimely frosts, inundations and indigestions. But ordered Nature—the Nature of the rolling year; night and day, and seedtime and harvest”—
“The seasons,” Ray broke in scornfully, from the resentment still souring in his soul, “turn themselves upside down and wrong end to, about as often as financial panics occur, and the farmer that has to rely on them is as apt to get left as the husbandman that sows and reaps in Wall Street.”
“Ah!” sighed Kane. “That was well said. I wish I had thought of it for my second series of Hard Sayings.”
“Oh, you’re welcome to it!”
“Are you so rich in paradoxes? But I will contrive to credit it somehow to the gifted author of A New Romeo. Is that what you call it?”