Howard, being the lion of the evening, tried his best to be agreeable. He kept near his mother, because it afforded her so much pride and satisfaction, and because he was obliged to keep away from Grant, who had begun to talk to the men. Howard talked mainly about their affairs, but still was forced more and more into talking of life in the city. As he told of the theatre and the concerts, a sudden change fell upon them; they grew sober, and he felt deep down in the hearts of these people a melancholy which was expressed only illusively with little tones or sighs. Their gayety was fitful. They were hungry for the world, for life--these young people. Discontented, and yet hardly daring to acknowledge it; indeed, few of them could have made definite statement of their dissatisfaction. The older people felt it less. They practically said, with a sigh of pathetic resignation: "Well, I don't expect ever to see these things now." A casual observer would have said, "What a pleasant bucolic--this little surprise-party of welcome!" But Howard, with his native ear and eye, had no such pleasing illusion. He knew too well these suggestions of despair and bitterness. He knew that, like the smile of the slave, this cheerfulness was self-defence; deep down was another unsatisfied ego. Seeing Grant talking with a group of men over by the kitchen door, he crossed over slowly and stood listening. Wesley Cosgrove--a tall, raw-boned young fellow with a grave, almost tragic face--was saying: "Of course I ain't. Who is? A man that's satisfied to live as we do is a fool." "The worst of it is," said Grant, without seeing Howard, "a man can't get out of it during his lifetime, and I don't know that he'll have any chance in the next--the speculator 'll be there ahead of us." The rest laughed, but Grant went on grimly: "Ten years ago Wess, here, could have got land in Dakota pretty easy, but now it's about all a feller's life's worth to try it. I tell you things seem shuttin' down on us fellers." "Plenty o' land to rent," suggested some one. "Yes, in terms that skin a man alive. More than that, farmin' ain't so free a life as it used to be. This cattle-raisin' and butter-makin' makes a nigger of a man. Binds him right down to the grindstone and he gets nothin' out of it--that's what rubs it in. He simply wallers around in the manure for somebody else. I'd like to know what a man's life is worth who lives as we do? How much higher is it than the lives the niggers used to live?" These brutally bald words made Howard thrill with emotion like the reading of some great tragic poem. A silence fell on the group. "That's the God's truth, Grant," said young Cosgrove, after a pause. "A man like me is helpless," Grant was saying. "Just like a fly in a pan of molasses. There's no escape for him. The more he tears around the more liable he is to rip his legs off." "What can he do?" "Nothin'." The men listened in silence.