But I had heard him lecture on that only the day before and, looking away from him, sought out the face of my cousin, the business-man. He had sat through it all, and now continued to sit through the free-for-all debate which followed, without opening his mouth except to emit an occasional thoughtful puff of cigar-smoke. His thoughts seemed to be with the billowing smoke-rings, which he sent towards the ceiling rather than with the great sweep of the subjects being discussed. I knew well enough that his silence did not come in the least from any inability to follow the pyrotechnics about him, and I felt in his absent preoccupation something of the disdain, traditionally felt for talkers and reformers by men of action--when in the twentieth century and in the United States, you say “man of action” you mean of course, “business-man.” It nettled me a little, and after the others had gone and he was finishing the end of his cigar, I said challengingly, “I suppose you think they are all off! I suppose you think that you know what is the matter with the world and that it is something quite different.” He considered the end of his cigar meditatively and answered mildly, “I don’t _think_ I know, I _know_ I know.” “Oh, you do, do you?” I said, amused and ironic. “Would you mind telling me what it is?” He shucked further down in his chair, tipped his head back and looked up at the ceiling. “Well, if you really want to know, I’ll tell you a story that happened just lately in one of the biggest mail-order houses in this country. Of course, I know that you don’t fully appreciate the importance of mail-order houses, not being in business. And they’re too through and through American a growth for people like your friends to-night to know about or talk about. But some of the best brains and real sure-enough genius in the United States have gone into creating the mail-order house idea. Maybe you might allow that to be a good enough reason for considering for a moment what goes on inside one of them ... what? “As a matter of fact, the story isn’t just about a mail-order house, but about what is the matter with the world ... the very same subject your friends were debating. My story won’t have so many long words in it as they use, nor so many abstract ideas ... at least on the surface; but it won’t do you any harm to soak it away and think it over. I’ll tell you what, _I’ve_ been thinking it over this evening, as I listened to the talk. I only heard the story this morning, and it’s stuck in my head all day ... and especially this evening, as they were all talking about how to hit on some organization of society that would really fix things up, once and for all.”