"You insist upon making fun of me," said Lance, forcing a smile, though a trifle mortified by her lack of enthusiasm. "But you know I'm right." "Indeed I don't know it!" exclaimed Miss Jessie, vigorously. "You want to change everything, but you can't tell what you would get by the change. You would like to cut down those splendid old trees in the swamp, and turn it into fresh vegetables and berries for New York. But the trees are much nobler than the berries, or even wild-flowers." "Oh no, I beg your pardon; they're not!" said Lance. "Most of the trees around here are simply monsters. They represent rude, primitive types of vegetation; they are the earliest specimens of Nature's effort to produce flowering plants. Why, the common ox-eye daisy is a far more refined product than they." "Oh, dear me," cried Jessie, "I never heard that. How much you know! But I like daisies, too; I don't want any of these things destroyed." "They sha'n't be, then," Lance declared, with offhand omnipotence. After that, he branched out into an informal lecture on the relationships of various plants and flowers, trying, in the sketchy way that he had learned from cheerfully popular books of science, to give her some conception of the evolution of new types and the persistence of old ones in the flora of the earth, together with the manifold delicate ties of kinship between the different existing forms. "Then, they are all one big family!" said Jessie, her face lighting with a sympathy that Lance reverently recorded as being maternal. She was as much pleased as if she had discovered a new set of thoroughly desirable relatives. "But oh, Mr. Lance," she added, quickly reflecting, "doesn't that prove that all these types have got to exist? You say that after one crude attempt has been followed by a better development, specimens of the old sort continue--like the pine trees. Now, it seems to me that it's just the same with the human family. We're all related, but we're very unlike; and while some of us have gone on improving, the others have stayed just as they were. The negroes and the poor whites around here are our monsters--for you say the pine trees are monsters--but if we have the pines, why shouldn't we have the others?" She clapped her hands, in her glee at the argument she had discovered; and it must be admitted that Lance was nonplussed by her swift sagacity. "But then you must remember," he said, after pausing, "that the human creation has a much greater capacity for growth than the vegetable; and we ought to help it forward in its growth. There's Sylvester De Vine as an example. See how he's rising above his condition! I take the greatest interest in that young fellow, and I believe I'm bound to assist him as far as I can." "Yes, that's true," Jessie acknowledged. "But it's very nice to have all these contrasts. I don't want them abolished."