“Well,” it was Thomsen who was now speaking, “then I suppose you are not willing to quarrel with the material revolution we have been through, because all that has come between the present and the past, like the sundering of Damocles’ sword, has saved us from the necessity of denuding ourselves of the old things, turning us loose in a fresh field, where we may play high jinks with all we once venerated, and where we may end by despising ourselves, for the very liberties you seem anxious for us to indulge in.” Leacraft motioned to the chairs, and the three sat down, in the same order as they stood. The place obviously was Leacraft’s, or he exercised some sort of control over it. And it was Miss Tobit’s voice which next took up the thread of talk--it was noticeable that Leacraft turned eagerly and looked at her, though his earnest face betrayed no symptoms of possession, in truth, a contemplative sadness for a moment rested on his features, vanishing even with its dawn. “Why give up old things? Why change and change and change? You call it progress. Is it anything but going around in a circle? You will come back to the very things you now reject, and some centuries hence the world will try the old experiments of Feudlism and Chivalry; and Kings by Divine Right will be as popular as elected Presidents--indeed, people may care some day as much as ever to say their prayers and go to church.” Both Leacraft and Thomsen laughed, but it was Leacraft who retorted, and he leaned far back in the Morris chair, his eyes bent upon the visionary ring of the horizon now webbed with bluescent shades. “I think there will be no returns, Mrs. Thomsen”--Ah! then Leacraft had lost again--“no Merry-go-round; our path, the path of humanity, is on and on and on, not always straight, not always level, and never final in its destinations. It was a physical chasm that separated the first colonies of this land from Europe. They brought with them traditions, customs, though luckily not of a very silly sort--but the lack of continuity with the whole antecedent history of England practically destroyed that history for them, and they began in untrammelled freedom to think for themselves and determine the essence of manhood, of worth, of liberty, of faith, of brotherhood, and their thinking throve upon nothing so much as the contemplation of the as yet, humanly speaking, unused world about them. “And the vicissitudes of living, the peril, the undiminished levy made by necessity upon their inventiveness, their industry, their courage, expelled the remaining vestiges of fealty to humbug, the pretense of class, the arrogance of office. They had wrested a living from Nature, under circumstances of unabashed familiarity with the cruelty of the savage, the obduracy of climate, and the grudging responses of a sterile soil, and they estimated worth by the hardihood of men who worked.