He tried to fit these facts with phrases in the intervals of his desultory talk with Kane, and he had got two or three very good epithets by the time they found seats together in an up-town train. It was not easy to find them, for the cars were thronged with work-people going to the Park for one of the last Sundays that could be fine there. Kane said: “The man we are going to see belongs to an order of thinking and feeling that one would have said a few years ago had passed away forever, but of late its turn seems to be coming again; it’s curious how these things recur. Do you happen to hate altruism in any of its protean forms?” Ray smiled with the relish for the question which Kane probably meant him to feel. “I can’t say that I have any violent feeling against it.” “It is usually repulsive to young people,” Kane went on, “and I could very well conceive your loathing it. My friend has been an altruist of one kind or another all his life. He’s a man whom it would be perfectly useless to tell that the world is quite good enough for the sort of people there are in it; he would want to set about making the people worthy of a better world, and he would probably begin on _you_. You have heard of Brook Farm, I suppose?” “Of course,” Ray answered, with a show of resentment for such a question. “_Blithedale Romance_--I think it’s the best of Hawthorne’s books.” “Blithedale,” said Mr. Kane, ignoring the literary interest, “is no more Brook Farm than--But we needn’t enter upon that! My friend’s career as an altruist began there; and since then there’s hardly been a communistic experiment in behalf of Man with a capital and without capital that he hasn’t been into and out of.” “I should like immensely to see him,” said Ray. “Any man who was at Brook Farm--Did he know Hollingsworth and Zenobia, and Priscilla and Coverdale? Was it at Brook Farm that you met?” Kane shook his head. “I think no one knew them but Hawthorne. I don’t speak positively; Brook Farm was a little before my day, or else I should have been there too, I dare say. But I’ve been told those characters never were.” Then it was doubly impossible that Hawthorne should have studied Miles Coverdale from Kane; Ray had to relinquish a theory he had instantly formed upon no ground except Kane’s sort of authority in speaking of Brook Farm; what was worse he had to abandon an instant purpose of carrying forward the romance and doing _The Last Days of Miles Coverdale_; it would have been an attractive title.