Ray blushed and laughed, and Kane continued:
“It’s a little beyond the fact, but it’s on the lines of truth. I don’t justify Nature altogether. She is not free from certain little foibles, caprices; perhaps that’s why we call her she. But I don’t think that, with all her faults, she’s quite so bad as Business. In that we seem to have gone to Nature for her defects. Why copy her weakness and bad faith? Why not study her steadfastness, her orderliness, her obedience, in laying the bases of civilization? We don’t go to her for the justification of murder, incest, robbery, gluttony, though you can find them all in her. We have our little prejudice against these things, and we seem to derive it from somewhere outside of what we call Nature. Why not go to that Somewhere for the law of economic life? But come,” Kane broke off, gayly, “let us babble of green fields; as for God, God, I hope we have no need to think of such things yet. Please Heaven, our noses are not as sharp as pens, by a long way. I don’t wonder you find it a beautiful and beneficent world, in spite of our friends yonder, who want to make it prettier and better, in their way.” Kane put his arm across Ray’s shoulder, and pulled him affectionately towards him. “Are you vexed with me for having introduced you to those people? I have been imagining something of the kind.”
“Oh, no”—Ray began.
“I didn’t really mean to stay for Hughes’s conventicle,” said Kane. “Chapley was wise, and went in time, before he could feel the wild charm of those visionaries; it was too much for me; when they began to come, I couldn’t go. I forgot how repugnant the golden age has always been to the heart of youth, which likes the nineteenth century much better. The fact is, I forgot that I had brought you till it was too late to take you away.”
He laughed, and Ray, more reluctantly, laughed with him.
“I have often wondered,” he went on, “how it is we lose the youthful point of view. We have it some night, and the next morning we haven’t it; and we can hardly remember what it was. I don’t suppose you could tell me what the youthful point of view of the present day is, though I should recognize that of forty years ago. I”—
He broke off to look at a party of horsemen pelting by on the stretch of the smooth hard road, and dashing into a bridle-path beyond. They were heavy young fellows, mounted on perfectly groomed trotters, whose round haunches trembled and dimpled with their hard pace.
“Perhaps that is the youthful point of view now: the healthy, the wealthy, the physically strong, the materially rich. Well, I think ours was better; pallid and poor in person and in purse as we imagined the condition of the ideal man to be. There is something,” said Kane, “a little more expressive of the insolence of money in one of those brutes than in the most glittering carriage and pair. I think if I had in me the material for really hating a fellow-man, I should apply it to the detestation of the rider of one of those animals. But I haven’t. I am not in prospective need even, and I am at the moment no hungrier than a gentleman ought to be who is going to lunch with a lady in the Mandan Flats. By-the-way! Why shouldn’t you come with me? They would be delighted to see you. A brilliant young widow, with a pretty step-daughter, is not to be lunched with every day, and I can answer for your welcome.”
Ray freed himself. “I’m sorry I can’t go. But I can’t. You must excuse me; I really couldn’t; I am very much obliged to you. But”—
“You don’t trust me!”