Bob left the mill-yards half-depressed, half-amused.  All his people had become alien.  He opposed them in nothing, his work in no way interfered with their activities; yet, without his volition, and probably without their realization, he was already looked upon as one to be held at arms’ length.  It saddened Bob, as it does every right-thinking young man when he arrives at setting up his own standards of conduct and his own ways of life.  He longed with a great longing, which at the same time he realized to be hopeless, to make these people feel as he felt.  It gave him real pain to find that his way of life could never gain anything beyond disapproval or incomprehension.  It took considerable fortitude to conclude that he now must build his own structure, unsupported.  He was entering the loneliness of soul inseparable from complete manhood.

After such disquieting contacts, the more uncomfortable in that they defied analysis, Bob rode out to the last lookout and gazed abroad over the land.  The pineclad bluff fell away nearly four thousand feet.  Below him the country lay spread like a relief map—­valley, lesser ranges, foothills, far-off plain, the green of trees, the brown of grass and harvest, the blue of glimpsed water, the haze of heat and great distance, the thread-like gossamer of roads, the half-guessed shimmer of towns and cities in the mirage of summer, all the opulence of earth and the business of human activity.  Millions dwelt in that haze, and beyond them, across the curve of the earth, hundreds of millions more, each actuated by its own selfishness or charity, by its own conception of the things nearest it.  Not one in a multitude saw or cared beyond the immediate, nor bothered his head with what it all meant, or whether it meant anything.  Bob, sitting on his motionless horse high up there in the world, elevated above it all, in an isolation of pines, close under his sky, bent his ear to the imagined faint humming of the spheres.  Affairs went on.  The machine fulfilled its function.  All things had their place, the evil as well as the good, the waste as well as the building, balancing like the governor of an engine the opposition of forces.  He saw, by the soft flooding of light, rather than by any flash of insight, that were the shortsightedness, the indifference, the ignorance, the crass selfishness to be eliminated before yet the world’s work was done, the energies of men, running too easily, would outstrip the development of the Plan, as a machine “races” without its load.  A humility came to him.  His not to judge his fellows by the mere externals of their deeds.  He could only act honestly according to what he saw, as he hoped others were doing.

“Just so a man isn’t mean, I don’t know as I have any right to despise him,” he summed it all up to his horse.  “But,” he added cheerfully, “that doesn’t prevent my kicking him into the paths of righteousness if he tries to steal my watch.”