_When the New Race comes--those whom Hudson calls "that blameless, spiritualized race that is to follow"--surely they will look back with some sense of actual romance upon the faint tapers which we now light, both individual and social tapers. They will make their allowance for us, as do we for the ambiguous knights of chivalry. And while the New Race will shudder at us--at our disorganization with its war, its poverty and its other crime--yet I think that they will love us a little for our ineffectual ministries, as already we love them for exceeding our utmost dream._ Don't you love a love-story; starting right before your eyes as casual as if it was preserves getting cooked or parsley coming up? It doesn't often happen to me to see one start, but once it did. It didn't start like anything at all that was going to be anything, but just still and quiet, same as the stars come out. I guess that's the way most great things move, isn't it? Still and quiet, like stars coming out. Or similar to stars. It was the time of the Proudfits' big what-they-called week-end parties, and it was the Saturday of the biggest of them, when a dozen city people came down to Friendship Village for the lark. And with them was to come a Piano Lady and a Violin Man--and a man I'd known about in the magazines, a Novel-and-Poem Man that writes the kind of things that gets through all the walls between you and the world, so's you can talk to everything there is. I was crazy to see the Novel-and-Poem Man--from behind somewheres, though, so's he wouldn't see me and look down on me. And when Miss Clementina Proudfit asked me to bring her out some things from the city Saturday night, chocolate peppermints and red candles and like that, and said she'd send the automobile to the train for me to fetch up the things and see the decorations, I was real pleased. But I was the most excited about maybe seeing the Poem-and-Novel Man. "What's he like, Miss Clementina?" I ask' her. "When I hear his name I feel like when I hear the President's. Or even more that way." "I've never met him," she says. "Mother knows him--he's her lion, not mine." "He writes lovely things," I says, "things that makes you feel like everybody's way of doing is only lukewarm, and like you could just bring yourself to a boil to do good and straighten things out in the world, no matter what the lukewarm-way folks thought." Miss Clementina looked over to me with a wonderful way she had--beautiful face and beautiful eyes softening to Summer. "I know--know," she says; "I dread meeting him, for fear he doesn't mean it." I knew what she meant. You can mean a thing you write in a book, or that you say in talk, or for other folks to do. But meaning it for _living_ it--that's different.