“No, you wouldn’t,” contradicted Radley, softening again.  “You’d expect them to be intolerant of you as old fashioned.  You’d withdraw behind your cigar-smoke and your old-fashioned ideas, and leave them to put the world to rights.  After all, it’s their world.”

Sec.2

Now, though you may think this a very uninteresting chapter—­a mere dialogue over the tea-cups, I take leave to present it to you as quite the most dramatic and most central of our humble tale.  The events that lend it this distinguished character were happening hundreds of miles from Radley’s room, in places where more powerful people than Penny or Doe or I were building Castles in the Air.  An Emperor was dreaming of a towering, feudal Castle, broad-based upon a conquered Europe and a servile East.  Nay, more, he had finished with dreaming.  All the materials of this master-mason were ready to the last stone.  And, if the two pistol-shots meant anything, they meant that the Emperor had begun to build.

And, since building was the order of the day, there were wise men in the councils of the Free Nations who saw that they must destroy the Emperor’s handiwork and build instead a Castle of their own, where Liberty, International Honour, and many other lovely things might find a home.  So for all of us self-opinionated boys, it was a matter of hours this summer evening before we should be told to tumble our petty Castles down, and shape from their ruins a brick or two for the Castle of the Free Peoples.  Well, we tumbled them down.  And the rest of this story, I think, is the story of the bricks that were made from their dust.

Sec.3

Doe and I left Radley and the doctor to their dispute, and retired to our study.  It was then that Doe began to blush and say: 

“Funny the subject of our ambitions cropped up.  Only a few days ago I tried to write a poem about it.”

I pleaded for permission to read it.

“You can, if you like,” he said, getting very crimson.  With trembling hands he extracted a notebook from his pocket and indicated the poem to me.  From that moment I saw that he was waiting in an agony of suspense for my approval.

I took it to the window, and, by the half-light of evening, read: 

   If God were pleased to satisfy
     My every whim,
   I’d tell you just the little things
     I’d ask of Him: 
   A little love—­a little love, and that comes first of all,
   And then a chance, and more than one, to raise up them that fall;
     Enough, not overmuch, to spend;
   And discourse that would charm me
     With one familiar friend;
   A little music, and, perhaps, a song or two to sing;

   And I would ask of God above to grant one other thing: 
     Before old Death can grimly smile
       And take me unawares,
     A little time to rest awhile,
       To think, and say my prayers.