“Ah, that wouldn’t do,” said Kane. “Cities are a vice, but they are essential to us now. We could not live without them; perhaps we are to be saved by them. But it is well to return to Nature from time to time.” “I thought I heard you saying some rather disparaging things of Nature a little while ago,” said Ray, with a remaining grudge against Kane, and with a young man’s willingness to convict his elder of any inconsistency, serious or unserious. “Oh, primeval Nature, yes. But I have nothing but praise for this kind--the kind that man controls and guides. It is outlaw Nature that I object to, the savage survival from chaos, the mother of earthquakes and cyclones, blizzards and untimely frosts, inundations and indigestions. But ordered Nature--the Nature of the rolling year; night and day, and seedtime and harvest”-- “The seasons,” Ray broke in scornfully, from the resentment still souring in his soul, “turn themselves upside down and wrong end to, about as often as financial panics occur, and the farmer that has to rely on them is as apt to get left as the husbandman that sows and reaps in Wall Street.” “Ah!” sighed Kane. “That was well said. I wish I had thought of it for my second series of _Hard Sayings_.” “Oh, you’re welcome to it!” “Are you so rich in paradoxes? But I will contrive to credit it somehow to the gifted author of _A New Romeo_. Is that what you call it?” Ray blushed and laughed, and Kane continued: “It’s a little beyond the fact, but it’s on the lines of truth. I don’t justify Nature altogether. She is not free from certain little foibles, caprices; perhaps that’s why we call her _she_. But I don’t think that, with all her faults, she’s quite so bad as Business. In that we seem to have gone to Nature for her defects. Why copy her weakness and bad faith? Why not study her steadfastness, her orderliness, her obedience, in laying the bases of civilization? We don’t go to her for the justification of murder, incest, robbery, gluttony, though you can find them all in her. We have our little prejudice against these things, and we seem to derive it from somewhere outside of what we call Nature. Why not go to that Somewhere for the law of economic life? But come,” Kane broke off, gayly, “let us babble of green fields; as for God, God, I hope we have no need to think of such things yet. Please Heaven, our noses are not as sharp as pens, by a long way. I don’t wonder you find it a beautiful and beneficent world, in spite of our friends yonder, who want to make it prettier and better, in their way.” Kane put his arm across Ray’s shoulder, and pulled him affectionately towards him. “Are you vexed with me for having introduced you to those people? I have been imagining something of the kind.” “Oh, no”--Ray began.