"'I'm trying to help nature, to be a part of nature—exactly,' says Insley, 'and to do it here in Friendship Village.'
"'Why,' says Alex, 'you'll be talking about facilitating God's plan next—helping him along, by Jove.'
"Insley looks at him level. 'I mean that now,' he says, 'if you want to put it that way.'
"'Good Lord,' says Alex, 'but how do you know what—what he wants?'
"'Don't you?' says Insley, even.
"Alex Proudfit turned and touched a bell. 'Look here,' he says, 'you stay and dine, won't you? I'm alone to-night—Calliope and I are. Stay. I always enjoy threshing this out.'
"To the man-servant who just about breathed with a well-trained stoop of being deferential, his master give the order about the table. 'And, Bayless, have them hunt out some of those tea-roses they had in bloom the other day—you should see them, Calliope. Oh, and, Bayless, hurry dinner a bit. I'm as hungry as lions,' he added to us, and he made me think of the little boy in knickerbockers, asking me for fresh cookies.
"He slipped back to their topic, ranking it right in with tea-roses. In the hour before dinner they went on 'threshing it out' there in that nice luxurious room, and through the dinner, too—a simple, perfect dinner where I didn't know which to eat, the plates or the food, they was both so complete. Up to Proudfit House I can hardly ever make out whether I'm chewing flavours or colours or shapes, but I donno as I care. Flavours, thank my stars, aren't the only things in life I know how to digest.
"First eager, then patient, Insley went over his ground, setting forth by line and by line, by vision and by vision, the faith that was in him—faith in human nature to come into its own, faith in the life of a town to work into human life at its best. And always down the same road they went, they come a-canterin' back with Alex Proudfit's 'Precisely. It is precisely what is happening. You can't force it. You mustn't force it. To do the best we can with ourselves and to help up an under dog or two—if he deserves it—that's the most Nature lets us in for. Otherwise she says: "Don't meddle. I'm doing this." And she's right. We'd bungle everything. Believe me, my dear fellow, our spurts of civic righteousness and national reform never get us anywhere in the long run. In the long run, things go along and go along. You can't stop them. If you're wise, you won't rush them.'