“We are all asses,” Kane sighed. “It is the great bond of human brotherhood. When did you get these verdicts?” “Oh, Mr. Brandreth told me Miss Hughes had taken them home with her yesterday, and I couldn’t rest till I had his leave to go and get them of her.” “Exactly. If we know there is possible unhappiness in store for us, we don’t wait for it; we make haste and look it up, and embrace it. And how did my dear old friend Hughes, if you saw him, impress you this time?” “I saw him, and I still prefer him to _his_ friends,” said Ray. “Naturally. There are not many people, even in a planet so overpeopled as this, who are the peers of David Hughes. He goes far to make me respect my species. Of course he is ridiculous. A man so hopeful as Hughes is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of the human proposition. How can there reasonably be hope in a world where poverty and death are? To be sure, Hughes proposes to eliminate poverty and explain death. You know he thinks--he really believes, I suppose--that if he could once get his millenium going, and everybody so blessed in this life that the absolute knowledge of heavenly conditions in another would not tempt us to suicide, then the terror and the mystery of death would be taken away, and the race would be trusted with its benificent meaning. It’s rather a pretty notion.” Ray, with his narrow experience, would not have been able to grasp it fully. Now he broke out without the least relevancy to it, “I wonder how it would do to remodel my story so far as to transfer the scene to New York? It might be more popular.” The criticism that one of those readers had made on the helplessness of his fidelity to simple rustic conditions had suddenly begun to gall him afresh. “I beg your pardon. I _didn’t_ notice what you were saying! I can’t get my mind off that miserable thing!” Kane laughed. “Oh, don’t apologize. I know how it is. Perhaps a change of scene _would_ be good; it’s often advised, you know.” He laughed again, and Ray with him, ruefully, and now he rose. “Oh, must you go?” Ray entreated. “Yes. You are best alone; when we are in pain we _are_, alone, anyway. If misery loves company, company certainly does not love misery. I can stand my own troubles, but not other people’s. Good-by! We will meet again when you are happier.” XXII.