“That is something I cannot judge of so well as Aristides; but he says M. Anatole is learned beyond any man he knows in edible fungi.”
“As an adoptive Altrurian, and knowing the American ideas from our point of view, should you respect their ideas of social inequality?”
“Not the least in the world. I understand as well as you do that their ideas must prevail wherever one works for a living and another does not. hose ideas are practically as much accepted in America as they are in Europe, but I have fully renounced them.”
You see, Dolly, how far I have gone!
The unknown, who could be pretty easily imagined, rose up and gave me her hand. “If you are in the Region on the third of May you must come to our wedding.”
The same afternoon I had a long talk with Mr. Thrall, whom I found at work replanting a strawberry-patch during the Voluntaries. He rose up at the sound of my voice, and after an old man's dim moment for getting me mentally in focus, he brightened into a genial smile, and said, “Oh, Mrs. Homos! I am glad to see you.”
I told him to go on with his planting, and I offered to get down on my knees beside him and help, but he gallantly handed me to a seat in the shade beside his daughter's flower-bed, and it was there that we had a long talk about conditions in America and Altruria, and how he felt about the great change in his life.
“Well, I can truly say,” he answered much more at length than I shall report, “that I have never been so happy since the first days of my boyhood. All care has dropped from me; I don't feel myself rich, and I don't feel myself poor in this perfect safety from want. The only thing that gives me any regret is that my present state has not been the effect of my own will and deed. If I am now following the greatest and truest of all counsels it has not been because I have sold all and given to the poor, but because my money has been mercifully taken from me, and I have been released from its responsibilities in a state of things where there is no money.”
“But, Mr. Thrall,” I said, “don't you ever feel that you have a duty to the immense fortune which you have left in America, and which must be disposed of somehow when people are satisfied that you are not going to return and dispose of it yourself?”
“No, none. I was long ago satisfied that I could really do no good with it. Perhaps if I had had more faith in it I might have done some good with it, but I believe that I never did anything but harm, even when I seemed to be helping the most, for I was aiding in the perpetuation of a state of things essentially wrong. Now, if I never go back—and I never wish to go back—let the law dispose of it as seems best to the authorities. I have no kith or kin, and my wife has none, so there is no one to feel aggrieved by its application to public objects.”