"If you will persist in talking serious things," said Ellery, "isn't obscurity, after all, an internal and not an external quality? You've got to believe that you are a creature that is worth while. There is no bitterness in belonging to the myriads if the myriads are themselves dignified by nature." "But are they?" cried Dick, now rousing himself. "I look at every face I pass on the street. I'm always on the search for some ideal quality; and what do I see? Egotism and greed answer me from all their eyes. The ninety and nine have gone astray." "Then it belongs to you to be the hundredth who does not go astray; and who gives a satisfactory answer to the same eternal questioning that meets you in the eyes of other men. It's not given to any man to play a neutral part in the world conflict. In all the magnificent interplay of forces, I doubt if there is any force strong enough to keep one standing still." "Yes, my dear Ellery. And it is just that eternal motion that I am complaining about. It is burdensome to the flesh and wearisome to the imagination to look forward to a future of eternal rushing and striving. I have a multitude of experiences every year, and I straightway forget them; and that deepens the impression that all these little affairs of ours, about which we make such an infernal racket at the time, are matters of very small importance in the march of the centuries. The march of the centuries may be majestic, but the waddle of this little ant of a man is not. It's insignificant." "That's a dangerous state of mind to be in, Dick," said Lenox. "And after all, you can't help being a very important thing to yourself," said Madeline. "And it must be of eternal significance to you whether your soul is walking with the centuries or against them." "My dear Madeline," answered Dick, "when I am with you and such as you who live on a little remote mountain, eternity seems a very important matter; but when I am with most people, next Wednesday, when taxes are due, looms up and shuts out eternity. And you will permit me to think that you women who are sheltered and who sit with the good things of life heaped about you, don't know very much about practical conditions." "But why isn't my conscience as practical as my clothes?" persisted Madeline. "And why is the fortune made to-day in Montana mines and lost to-morrow in Wall Street any more practical than this same majestic march of the centuries and the great thoughts that circle about it? 'Practical' is such a foolish word, Dick."