“Ah, Denton!” said Mr. Kane. “Good-morning, good-morning! This is my friend, Mr. Ray.” The young men shook hands with a provisional civility, and Mr. Kane asked, “Are you all at home?” “We are, at the moment,” said the other. “I’m just going out with the babies; but father will be glad to see you. Come in.” He had a thick voice that came from his throat by nervous impulses; he set the door open and twisted his head in the direction of the stairs, as if to invite them to go up. They found he had a perambulator in the narrow hall behind the door, and two children facing each other in it. He got it out on the sidewalk without further attention to them, and shut the door after him. But in the light which his struggles to get out had let into the entry they made their way up the stairs, where a woman’s figure stood silhouetted against an open door-way behind her. “Ah, Mrs. Denton, how do you do?” said Kane, gaily. The figure answered gaily back, “Oh, Mr. Kane!” and after Kane’s presentation of Ray, set open a door that opened from the landing into the apartment. “Father will be so glad to see you. Please walk in.” Ray found himself in what must be the principal room of the apartment; its two windows commanded an immediate prospect of the elevated road, with an effect of having their sills against its trestle work. Between them stood a tall, gaunt old man, whose blue eyes flamed under the heavy brows of age, from a face set in a wilding growth of iron-gray hair and beard. He was talking down upon a gentleman whom Ray had black against the light, and he was saying: “No, Henry, no! Tolstoï is mistaken. I don’t object to his theories of non-resistance; the Quakers have found them perfectly practicable for more than two centuries; but I say that in quitting the scene of the moral struggle, and in simplifying himself into a mere peasant, he begs the question as completely as if he had gone into a monastery. He has struck out some tremendous truths, I don’t deny that, and his examination of the conditions of civilization is one of the most terrifically searching studies of the facts that have ever been contributed to the science of sociology; but his conclusions are as wrong as his premises are right. If I had back the years that I have wasted in a perfectly futile effort to deal with the problem of the race at a distance where I couldn’t touch it, I would have nothing to do with eremitism in any of its forms, either collectively as we have had it in our various communistic experiments, or individually on the terms which Tolstoï apparently advises.” “But I don’t understand him to advise eremitism,” the gentleman began. “It amounts to the same thing,” said the other, cutting himself short in hollow cough, so as not to give up the word. “He would have us withdraw from the world, as if, where any man was, the world was not there in the midst of him!”