"Well, it's nonsense I tell you! Look here, Laura, if there is a God, he's put those dagos and ignorant foreigners down there to work; just as he's put the fish in the sea to be caught, and the beasts of the field to be eaten, and it's none of my business to ask why! My job is myself--myself and you! I refuse to bear burdens for people. I love you with all the intensity of my nature--but it's my nature--not human nature--not any common, socialized, diluted love; it's individual and it's forever between you and me! What do I care for the rest of the world! And if you love me as you will some day, you'll love me so that they can't set you off mooning about other people's troubles. I tell you, Laura, I'm going to make you love me so you can't think of anything day or night but me--and what I am to you! That's my idea of love! It's individual, intimate, restricted, qualified and absolutely personal--and some day you'll see that!" As he tripped down the hill from the Nesbit home that spring night, he wondered what Laura Nesbit meant when she spoke of Grant Adams, and his love for the motherless baby. The idea that this love bore any sort of resemblance to the love of educated, cultivated people as found in the love that Laura and her intended husband bore toward each other, puzzled the young lawyer. Being restless, he turned off his homeward route, and walked under the freshly leaved trees. Over and over again the foolish phrases and sentences from Laura Nesbit's love making, many other nights in which she seemed to assume the unquestioned truth of the hypothesis of God, also puzzled him. Whatever his books had taught him, and whatever life had taught him, convinced him that God was a polite word for explaining one's failure. Yet, here was a woman whose mind he had to respect, using the term as a proved theorem. He looked at the stars, wheeling about with the monstrous pulleys of gravitation and attraction, and the certain laws of motion. A moment later he looked southward in the sky to that flaming, raging, splotched patch where the blue and green and yellow flames from the smelters and the belching black smoke from the factories hid the low-hanging stars and marked the seething hell of injustice and vice and want and woe that he knew was in South Harvey, and he held the glowing cigarette stub in his hand and laughed when he thought of God. "Free will," says "Mr. Left" in one of his rather hazy and unconvincing observations, "is of limited range. Man faces two buttons. He must choose the material or the spiritual--and when he has chosen fate plays upon his choice the grotesque variation of human destiny. But when the cloth of life is finished, the pattern of the passing events may be the same in either choice, riches or poverty, misery or power, only the color of the cloth differs; in one piece, however rich, the pattern is drab with despair, the other cloth sheens in happiness." Which Mr. Van Dorn in later life, reading the