"I never heard you explain so beautifully that 'Back to Nature' idea. I went West once and lived a year with some red folks who have been so fortunate as to never get away from Nature. They have been doing business at the same stand for several thousand years. Their women are old hags at your wife's age, and their men die at mine--forty-five. Their social institutions are an exact reflection of their personal attainments." "But we propose," Gordon flashed, "to make institutions an advance on man's attainments and so lead him onward and upward." "Exactly," he answered, dryly. "Make human nature divine by writing it on paper that it is so, pile water into a pyramid upside down, and repeal the law of gravitation by the vote of a mob. I don't like the law of gravitation myself, but I haven't time to repeal it." "You are a hopeless materialist." "Yet you, who preach the Spirit, propose to build a heaven here out of mud." "Socialism may be the great delusion, but it's coming. It sweeps the imagination of the world," Gordon cried, with enthusiasm. "There you go! Every time I pin you down, you sail off into space with prophecy or poetry. If it does conquer the world, the world will not be worth conquering. The one thing worth while is character, and your Socialistic pig-pen cannot produce it. In this herd of swine to which you hope to reduce society an Edison or a Darwin is rewarded with the pay of a hod-carrier. The hod-carrier gets all he's worth now. This instinct for the herd, which you call Solidarity and Brotherhood, is not a prophecy of progress; it is a memory--a memory of the dirt out of which humanity has slowly grown." Gordon grunted contemptuously. "Yet only a brute can be content with the cruelty and infamy of our present society." "All our ills can be met by careful legislation. You propose to pull the tree up by the roots because you see bugs crawling on a limb." Kate rose and left the room, saying she would return in a moment, and Overman leaned back in his chair again, gazing at the ceiling. Suddenly straightening himself, he drew his brow down close over his eye, half closing its lid, bent toward Gordon, and in a low tone slowly asked: "But I would like to know, Frank, what in the devil you really meant by that 'Freedom and Fellowship' in marriage?" "Just what I said." "Bah! You don't mean to apply such tommyrot to your own wife now that she's yours?" "Certainly." "It's beyond belief that you're such a fool. You say to your wife and to the world, 'This peerless woman is my comrade, but she is free; take her if you can.'" Gordon laughed. "Yes; but, Mark, old boy, God has not yet made the man who can take her from me." The one eye dreamily closed, the banker whistled softly, and said: "I see." CHAPTER XXIII THE NEW HEAVEN