A week or two later Rogers cut out all qualifying words and said from his heart, "I'm glad you know!" He and David quickly became comrades; and many an hour they sat in the room behind the office talking of life, of philosophy, of books. David now learned that Rogers had done a large part of his really wide reading while in prison; and he now understood Rogers's frequent mispronunciation--Rogers had acquired his less common words entirely from reading, and never having heard them spoken, and lacking such fundamentals of education as rules of pronunciation, he had for fifteen years been pronouncing his new words as seemed to him proper. David was surprised to find that Rogers, for all his occasional bitter flashes, was an optimist. He often marvelled how Rogers had retained this hopefulness for the world's future; he could explain it only by a great natural soundness in the man. Rogers believed the world was marching forward, and he often said, his eyes illumined with belief: "The time is coming, Aldrich--I shall not see it, and you may not, but it's coming--when there will be no human waste, when the world will have learned the economy of men!" Frequently they discussed society's treatment of the criminal, and David learned that Rogers burned with an indignation as great as his own. If ever Rogers's obsessing fear should be fulfilled, if he should be found out, then his one desire, a desire always with him, was to speak out his bitter accusation in the world's face. One warm, exuberant Sunday toward the end of February, they walked northward through Riverside Park, the broad, glinting Hudson at their left. When they reached the height crowned by Grant's tomb, Rogers, who had been silent for several minutes, now and then slipping meditative glances at David, laid a hand on David's arm and brought him to a pause. "Look across yonder," he whispered, pointing to the Palisades that lifted their mighty shoulders from the Hudson's farther edge. "Wonderful, aren't they," said David, letting his eyes travel northward along the giant wall till it dimmed away. "Yes--but I didn't mean the view." Rogers drew nearer, and went on in a whisper, while the crowd of Sunday promenaders sauntered by their backs: