He held it up admiringly, turning it so that the light would show it at its best, and looked at it respectfully.  “There’s no wood like maple,” he said.  Mr. Crittenden answered, “Yep.  The Warner land is just right for slow-growing trees.”  He took it out of the workman’s hand, looked it over more closely with an evident intelligent certainty of what to look for, and handed it back with a nod that signified his appreciation of the wood and of the workmanship which had brought it to that state.

There had been about that tiny, casual human contact a quality which Mr. Welles did not recognize.  His curiosity rose again.  He wondered if he might not succeed in getting some explanation out of the manufacturer, if he went about it very tactfully.  He would wait for his chance.  He began to perceive with some surprise that he was on the point of quite liking Mrs. Crittenden’s husband.

So he tried another question, after a while, very cautiously, and was surprised to find Mr. Crittenden no longer snappish, but quite friendly.  It occurred to him as the pleasantest possibility that he might find his liking for the other man returned.  That would be a new present hung on the Christmas tree of his life in Vermont.

On the strength of this possibility, and banking on the friendliness in the other man’s eyes, he drove straight at it, the phrase which the minister had used when he said that Mr. Crittenden thought of business as an ideal service to humanity as much as doctoring.  That had sounded so ignorant and ministerial he hadn’t even thought of it seriously, till after this contact with the man of whom it had been said.  The best way with Crittenden was evidently the direct one.  He had seen that in the first five minutes of observation of him.  So he would simply tell him how bookish and impossible it had sounded, and see what he had to say.  He’d probably laugh and say the minister had it all wrong, of course, regular minister’s idea.

And so presently they were off, on a real talk, beyond what he had hoped for, and Crittenden was telling him really what he had meant.  He was saying in his firm, natural, easy voice, as though he saw nothing specially to be self-conscious about in it, “Why, of course I don’t rank lumbering and wood-working with medicine.  Wood isn’t as vital to human life as quinine, or a knowledge of what to do in typhoid fever.  But after all, wood is something that people have to have, isn’t it?  Somebody has to get it out and work it up into usable shape.  If he can do this, get it out of the woods without spoiling the future of the forests, drying up the rivers and all that, and have it transformed into some finished product that people need in their lives, it’s a sort of plain, everyday service, isn’t it?  And to do this work as economically as it can be managed, taking as low a price as you can get along with instead of screwing as high a price as possible out of the people who have to have it, what’s