Ahead of him in the street, almost two blocks ahead, a man walked. John Webster had met the man once. He was a professor in a small college of the town, and once, two or three years before, there had been an effort made, on the part of the college president, to raise money among local business men to help the school through a financial crisis. A dinner was given and attended by a number of the college faculty and by an organization called the Chamber of Commerce to which John Webster belonged. The man who now walked before him had been at the dinner and he and the washing machine manufacturer had been seated together. He wondered if he might now presume on that brief acquaintanceship to go and talk with the man. He had been thinking rather unusual thoughts to come into a man’s head and perhaps, if he could talk with some other man and in particular with a man whose business in life it was to have thoughts and to understand thought, something might be gained. There was a narrow strip of grass between the sidewalk and the roadway and along this John Webster began to run. He just grabbed his hat in his hand and ran bareheaded for perhaps two hundred yards and then stopped and looked quietly up and down the street. It was all right, after all. Apparently no one had seen his strange performance. There were no people sitting on the porches of the houses along the street. He thanked God for that. Ahead of him the college professor went soberly along with a book under his arm, unaware that he was followed. When he saw that his absurd performance had escaped notice John Webster laughed. “Well, I went to college myself once. I’ve heard enough college professors talk. I don’t know why I should expect anything from one of that stripe.” Perhaps to speak of the things that had been in his mind that day something almost like a new language would be required. There was that thought about Natalie being a house kept clean and sweet for living, a house into which one might go gladly and joyfully. Could he, a washing machine manufacturer of a Wisconsin town, stop on the street a college professor and say--“I want to know, Mr. College Professor, if your house is clean and sweet for living so that people may come into it and, if it is so, I want you to tell me how you went about it to cleanse your house.” The notion was absurd. It made one laugh to even think of any such thing. There would have to be new figures of speech, a new way of looking at things. For one thing people would have to be more truly aware of themselves than they had ever been before. Almost in the centre of town and before a stone building that was some kind of public institution there was a small park with benches and John Webster stopped following the college professor and went and sat on one of them. From where he sat he could see along two of the principal business thoroughfares.