“At all events, we can try,” answered Reuben, with the glow of earnestness shining on his face. “John Fairchild is almost as fond of the notion as I am, and his paper will be of all sorts of use. Then, there’s Father Chance, the Catholic priest, a splendid fellow, and Dr. Lester, and the Rev. Mr. Turner, and a number of others more or less friendly to the scheme. I’m sure they will all feel the importance of having you in it. Your having lived in Europe makes such a difference. You can see things with a new eye.” Horace gave a little laugh. “What my new eye has seen principally so far,” he said, with an amused smile running through his words, “is the prevalence of tobacco juice. But of course there are hundreds of things our provincial people could learn with profit from Europe. There, for example, is the hideous cooking done at all the small places. In England, for instance, it is a delight to travel in the country, simply because the food is so good in the little rural inns; our country hotel here is a horror. Then the roads are so bad here, when they might be made so good. The farmer works out his road tax by going out and ploughing up the highway, and you break your carriage-wheels in the task of smoothing it down again. Porters to carry one’s luggage at railway stations--that’s something we need, too. And the drinking of light beers and thin, wholesome wines instead of whiskey--that would do a great deal. Then men shouldn’t be allowed to build those ugly flat-topped wooden houses, with tin eaves-troughs. No people can grow up to be civilized who have these abominations thrust upon their sight daily. And--oh, I had forgotten!--there ought to be a penal law against those beastly sulphur matches with black heads. I lit one by accident the other night, and I haven’t got the smell of it out of my nostrils yet.” Horace ended, as he had begun, with a cheerful chuckle; but his companion, who sat looking abstractedly at the snow line of the roofs opposite, did not smile. “Those are the minor things--the graces of life,” he said, speaking slowly. “No doubt they have their place, their importance. But I am sick at heart over bigger matters--over the greed for money, the drunkenness, the indifference to real education, the neglect of health, the immodesty and commonness of our young folks’ thought and intercourse, the narrowness and mental squalor of the life people live all about me--” “It is so everywhere, my dear fellow,” broke in Horace. “You are making us worse by comparison than we are.” “But we ought to be so infinitely better by comparison! And we have it really in us to be better. Only nobody is concerned about the others; there is no one to check the drift, to organize public feeling for its own improvement. And that”--Reuben suddenly checked himself, and looked at his new partner with a smile of wonderful sweetness--“that is what I dream of trying to do. And you are going to help me!”