The Altrurian must have perceived that we were joking, though the Camps all remained soberly silent. “I hope it isn’t so bad as that,” he said, “though I have noticed that I seem to affect you all with a kind of misgiving. I don’t know just what it is; but, if I could remove it, I should be very glad to do so.” Mrs. Makely very promptly seized her chance: “Well, then, in the first place, my husband and I were talking it over last night after we left you, and that was one of the things that kept us awake; it turned into money afterward. It isn’t so much that a whole continent, as big as Australia, remained undiscovered till within such a very few years, as it is the condition of things among you: this sort of all living for one another, and not each one for himself. My husband says that is simply moonshine; such a thing never was and never can be; it is opposed to human nature, and would take away incentive and all motive for exertion and advancement and enterprise. I don’t know _what_ he didn’t say against it; but one thing, he says it’s perfectly un-American.” The Altrurian remained silent, gravely smiling, and Mrs. Makely added, with her most engaging little manner: “I hope you won’t feel hurt, personally or patriotically, by what I’ve repeated to you. I know my husband is awfully Philistine, though he _is_ such a good fellow, and I don’t, by any means, agree with him on all those points; but I _would_ like to know what you think of them. The trouble is, Mrs. Camp,” she said, turning to the invalid, “that Mr. Homos is so dreadfully reticent about his own country, and I am so curious to hear of it at first hands, that I consider it justifiable to use any means to make him open up about it.” “There is no offence,” the Altrurian answered for himself, “in what Mr. Makely says, though, from the Altrurian point of view, there is a good deal of error. “Does it seem so strange to you,” he asked, addressing himself to Mrs. Camp, “that people should found a civilization on the idea of living for one another instead of each for himself?” “No indeed!” she answered. “Poor people have always had to live that way, or they could not have lived at all.” “That was what I understood your porter to say last night,” said the Altrurian to me. He added, to the company generally: “I suppose that even in America there are more poor people than there are rich people?” “Well, I don’t know about that,” I said. “I suppose there are more people independently rich than there are people independently poor.”