"I think I could quite understand anything you cared to tell me," he said, smiling into her eyes. "Please give me your reasons for cultivating the character of a Toledo blade. Is it your intention to marshal all the clans of all the advanced women and lead them against the more occupied and disunited sex? I am told that it is a standing grievance in Rosewater that you will not join that Literary--Political--Improvement--and all the rest of it Club. I should think with your ambitions and--well--masterful disposition, you would assume its leadership as a sort of preliminary course." "I intend to be a whole club in myself." "Appalling! But what _do_ you mean by that cryptic assertion? I told you that I could understand anything you chose to explain, but, as they say out here, I am not good at guessing." "I am working out a theory of my own. It has been demonstrated that labor, capital, all the known forces, are far stronger when concentrated and organized. I believe in concentrating all the faculties about a will strong enough not only to conquer life but all the inherited weaknesses that beset one daily within. That is a minor matter, however. I believe that our higher faculties were given to us for no purpose but to create within ourselves an individual strength that will add to the sum of strength in the world. It is not necessary to proclaim this strength from the house-tops, nor to search for windmills--a positive enemy it would leap at automatically--nor even to seek to improve the world by all the tried and generally futile devices. It is enough to be. I alone may not add greatly to this subjective strength of the world; but think what life would be did each individual succeed in making himself but one degree less strong than God himself! It may be my destiny to make propaganda without noise; but if not, the achievement of absolute strength in myself will move the world forward to its millennium one-millionth part of a degree at least. For that will be the real millennium--when there shall be no despicable weakness in the world, no moral rottenness, when each individual shall rely upon himself alone, independent of the environment from which the majority to-day draw everything good and bad, their happiness or misery. Nothing will ever purge human nature but the triumph of the higher faculties, a triumph accomplished by an unswervingly cultivated and jealously maintained strength." "I don't deny that your millennium has its points, but would that not be rather a hard world? What of love, the interdependence of the sexes, and all the other human relations?"