"He leaned back, laughing. Insley must have felt his charm. Alex always was fascinating. His eyes were gray and sort of hobnobbed with your own; his square chin just kind of threatened a dimple without breaking into one; his dark hair done clusters like a statue; and then there was a lot of just plain charm pouring off him. But of course more than with this, Insley was filled with his own hope: if Alex Proudfit understood some things about the village that ought to be made right, it looked to him as though they might do everything together.
"'Why,' Insley says, 'you don't know—you don't know how glad I am to hear you say this. It's exactly the thing my head has been full of....'
"'Of course your head is full of it,' says Alex. 'How can it help but be when you're fast here some of the time? If you don't mind—what is it that keeps you here at all? I don't think I read Topping's letter properly....'
"Insley looked out from all over his face.
"'I stay,' he says, 'just because all this is so. It needs somebody to stay, don't you think?'
"'Ah, yes, I see,' says Alex, rapid and foreign. 'How do you mean, though? Surely you don't mean renouncing—and that sort of thing?'
"'Renouncing—no!' says Insley. 'Getting into the game.'
"He got his enthusiasm down into still places and outlined what he meant. It was all at the ends of his fingers—what there was to do if the town was to live up to itself, to find ways to express the everyday human fellowship that Insley see underneath everything. And Alex Proudfit listened, giving that nice, careful, pacifying attention of his. He was always so polite that his listening was like answering. When Insley got through, Alex's very disagreeing with him was sympathizing.
"'My dear man,' says he—I remember every word because it was something I'd wondered sometimes too, only I'd done my wondering vague, like you do—'My dear man, but are you not, after all, anticipating? This is just the way Nature works—beating these things into the heads and hearts of generations. Aren't you trying to do it all at once?'