"I assure you I know whereof I speak. These men who grind the faces of the poor; these railroad magnates, manufacturers, corn kings, bankers, toiling day and night in stuffy offices--oh, I saw them in New York; I lived among them; I see them still"--his eyes blazed--"toiling, oppressing, cheating, to lay up riches. What have they in reality left to their children--a hoard of yellow gold? More than that; more than an inheritance of strained nerves and bending backs. They have left them the means of gratifying their sloth and their gluttony." He took a turn up and down the room, shaking his head. He stopped suddenly before his nephew with a look of grim pleasure. "It's poor comfort, but let the beggar in the street know himself revenged. The rich man, who has just refused him a dime to buy a dinner, goes home, and what he overeats and overdrinks, that would feed and revive the beggar, provides your rich man with his gout and fifty fine disorders unknown among the poor. When he refuses to share his dinner with the hungry, your Dives gets not only curses, but diseases of the digestive organs." Ethan burst out laughing at the vindictive satisfaction of the climax. "Come, can you deny it?" his uncle urged. "Drugs, kurs, baths--these are needed only to repair the waste of stupid living; they are substitutes for the right kind of labor and of fare, but they only patch the breach that simpler living would make whole." "You make me think of James Benton. You know him by reputation?" "Specialist?--nerves? Yes, very good man." "Well, he'd been attending a fashionable woman in New York--for about ten years, he told me. She'd paid him enormous fees to run over from Boston and 'keep her going.' He was rather sick of it, and one day he said: 'Oh yes, I can vary the tonic and bolster you up for the season; but I _could_ cure you, you know.' 'Brute!' she screamed, 'then why haven't you in all these years?' 'You won't take my medicine.' 'Which medicine?' 'Six months' service as housemaid in a farm-house in the White Mountains.'" "Well," said John Gano, with interest, "and the woman?" "Oh, she only laughed. However, there are a certain number of people, I find over here, who do care about physical culture. Fellows at the universities think a lot more about athletics than they did in my time. Girls' colleges pay tremendous attention to that sort of thing. Haven't you noticed? Our women are finding out it touches the 'beauty question.' That's done more than all the books and doctors in creation. Oddly enough, our society women in particular, as I saw at Newport--" "Yes, yes," interrupted his uncle. "We're moving in the right direction, but slowly--very slowly. Even health is little more with us as yet than a newly discovered prerogative of the prosperous. They're finding out it's the condition of survival. Oh, give us time, and it'll come all right."