I can still remember that evening. The table between us was covered with papers; and a shaded lamp threw a soothing light upon them. All the rest of the room was in shadow; and I saw her face against the setting of the darkness behind her. In the next room I could feel the slow steps of Nordenholt in his study, pacing up and down as he revolved some problem in his mind. “When I think about it,” she went on, after a pause, “you men amaze me. In the mass, I mean, of course; I’m not talking about individuals. There seem to be three classes of you. The biggest class is simply looking for what it calls ‘a good time.’ It wants to enjoy itself; it looks on the world just as a playground; and it never seems to get beyond the stage of a child crying for amusement in a nursery. At the end of things, that type leaves the world just where the world was before. It achieves nothing; and often it merely bores itself. It doesn’t even know how to look for happiness. I don’t see much chance for that type in the future, now that things have changed. “Then there’s a second class which is a shade better. They want to make money; and they’re generally successful in that, for they are single-minded. But in concentrating on money, it seems to me, they lose everything else. In the end, they can do nothing with their money except turn it into more. They can’t spend it profitably; they haven’t had the education for that. They just gather money in, and gather it in, and become more and more slaves to their acquisitive instincts. To a certain extent they are better than the first type of men, for they do incidentally achieve something in the world. You can’t begin to make money without doing _something_. You need to manufacture or to transport goods or develop resources or organise in some way; so mankind as a whole profits incidentally. “Then you come to the last of the types: the men who want to _do_ something. Activity is their form of happiness. All the inventors and discoverers and explorers belong to that class, all the artists and engineers and builders of things, great or small. Their happiness is in creation, bringing something new into the world, whether it’s new knowledge or new methods or new beauty. But they are the smallest class of all.” “What amazes you in that?” “The difference in the proportions of men in the different classes, of course. You know what the third type get out of life: you’re one of them yourself. Wouldn’t things be better if everyone got these things? Don’t you think the pleasure of creation is the greatest of all?” “Of course I do; but that’s because I’m built that way. I can’t help it.” “Well, I think that a good many of the rest of us have the instinct too; but it gets stifled very early. It seems to me that our education in the past has been all wrong. It has never been education at all, in the proper sense of the term. It’s been a case of putting things into minds instead of drawing out what the mind contains already.”