"All I meant by him was that people who conform outwardly to a standard they don't really believe in, are in danger of getting most awfully mixed up. And certainly they don't stand any chance of convincing anybody else that there's anything the matter with the standard. What's needed isn't to upset everything in a heap, but to call people's attention to the fact that things could be a lot better than they are. And that's hard to do. And who ever called more people's attention to that fact than an impractical, unbalanced nobleman who took to cobbling shoes for the peace of his soul? There wasn't a particle of sense to what Tolstoi _did_, but--" He stopped, hesitating in an uncertainty that Lydia understood with a touching humility. "Oh, you needn't explain who Tolstoi is. I've heard of him." "Well, you mustn't imagine I'm anything like Tolstoi!" cried the young man, laughing aloud at the idea, "for I don't take a bit of stock in his deification of working with your muscles. That was an exaggeration he fell into in his old age because he'd been denied his fair share of manual work when he was young. If he'd had to split kindlings and tote ashes and hoe corn when he was a boy, I bet he wouldn't have thought there was anything so sanctifying about callouses on your hands!" "Oh, dear! You're awfully confusing to me," complained Lydia. "You always seem to be making fun of something I thought just the minute before you believed in." Rankin looked intensely serious. "There isn't an impression I'd be sorrier to give you," he said earnestly. "Perhaps the trouble is that you don't as yet know much about the life I've got out of." "I've lived in Endbury all my life," protested Lydia. "There may still be something for you to learn about the lives of its men," suggested her companion. "If you think it's so wrong, why don't you reform it?" Lydia launched this challenge suddenly at him with the directness characteristic of her nation. "I have to begin with reforming myself," he said, "and that's job enough to last me a long while. I have to learn not to care about being considered a failure by all the men of my own age who are passing me by; and I don't mind confessing to you that that is not always easy--though you mustn't tell Dr. Melton I'm so weak. I have to train myself to see that they are not really getting _up_ so fast, but only _scrambling_ fast over slipping, sliding stones; and then I have to try to find some firm ground where I can make a path of my own, up which I can plod in my own way." The tone of the young people, as they talked with their innocent grandiloquence of these high matters, might have been taken for that of a couple deep in some intimate discussion, so honestly serious and moved was it. There was a silence now, also like the pause in a profoundly personal talk, in which they looked long into each other's eyes.