CHAPTER IX.

LOVERS AND LOVERS.

Albert Charlton had little money, and he was not a man to remain idle.  He was good in mathematics, and did a little surveying now and then; in fact, with true democratic courage, he turned his hand to any useful employment.  He did not regard these things as having any bearing on his career.  He was only waiting for the time to come when he could found his Great Educational Institution on the virgin soil of Minnesota.  Then he would give his life to training boys to live without meat or practical jokes, to love truth, honesty, and hard lessons; he would teach girls to forego jewelry and cucumber-pickles, to study physiology, and to abhor flirtations.  Visionary, was he?  You can not help smiling at a man who has a “vocation,” and who wants to give the world a good send-off toward its “goal.”  But there is something noble about it after all.  Something to make you and me ashamed of our selfishness.  Let us not judge Charlton by his green flavor.  When these discordant acids shall have ripened in the sunshine and the rain, who shall tell how good the fruit may be?  We may laugh, however, at Albert, and his school that was to be.  I do not doubt that even that visionary street-loafer known to the Athenians as Sokrates, was funny to those who looked at him from a great distance below.

During the time in which Charlton waited, and meditated his plans for the world’s advancement by means of a school that should be so admirable as to modify the whole system of education by the sheer force of its example, he found it of very great advantage to unfold his plans to Miss Helen Minorkey.  Miss Helen loved to hear him talk.  His enthusiasm was the finest thing she had found, out of books.  It was like a heroic poem, as she often remarked, this fine philanthropy of his, and he seemed to her like King Arthur preparing his Table Round to regenerate the earth.  This compliment, uttered with the coolness of a literary criticism—­and nothing could be cooler than a certain sort of literary criticism—­this deliberate and oft-repeated compliment of Miss Minorkey always set Charlton’s enthusiastic blood afire with love and admiration for the one Being, as he declared, born to appreciate his great purposes.  And the Being was pleased to be made the partner of such dreams and hopes.  In an intellectual and ideal fashion she did appreciate them.  If Albert had carried out his great plans, she, as a disinterested spectator, would have written a critical analysis of them much as she would have described a new plant.