When Ralph was home at Christmas time, he wore on his little finger a heavy gold ring, with a diamond as big as a pea, surrounded by showy grooves in the metal.  He admitted to Claude that he had won it in a poker game.  Ralph’s hands were never free from automobile grease—­they were the red, stumpy kind that couldn’t be kept clean.  Claude remembered him milking in the barn by lantern light, his jewel throwing off jabbing sparkles of colour, and his fingers looking very much like the teats of the cow.  That picture rose before him now, as a symbol of what successful farming led to.

The farmer raised and took to market things with an intrinsic value; wheat and corn as good as could be grown anywhere in the world, hogs and cattle that were the best of their kind.  In return he got manufactured articles of poor quality; showy furniture that went to pieces, carpets and draperies that faded, clothes that made a handsome man look like a clown.  Most of his money was paid out for machinery,—­and that, too, went to pieces.  A steam thrasher didn’t last long; a horse outlived three automobiles.

Claude felt sure that when he was a little boy and all the neighbours were poor, they and their houses and farms had more individuality.  The farmers took time then to plant fine cottonwood groves on their places, and to set osage orange hedges along the borders of their fields.  Now these trees were all being cut down and grubbed up.  Just why, nobody knew; they impoverished the land... they made the snow drift... nobody had them any more.  With prosperity came a kind of callousness; everybody wanted to destroy the old things they used to take pride in.  The orchards, which had been nursed and tended so carefully twenty years ago, were now left to die of neglect.  It was less trouble to run into town in an automobile and buy fruit than it was to raise it.

The people themselves had changed.  He could remember when all the farmers in this community were friendly toward each other; now they were continually having lawsuits.  Their sons were either stingy and grasping, or extravagant and lazy, and they were always stirring up trouble.  Evidently, it took more intelligence to spend money than to make it.

When he pondered upon this conclusion, Claude thought of the Erlichs.  Julius could go abroad and study for his doctor’s degree, and live on less than Ralph wasted every year.  Ralph would never have a profession or a trade, would never do or make anything the world needed.

Nor did Claude find his own outlook much better.  He was twenty-one years old, and he had no skill, no training,—­no ability that would ever take him among the kind of people he admired.  He was a clumsy, awkward farmer boy, and even Mrs. Erlich seemed to think the farm the best place for him.  Probably it was; but all the same he didn’t find this kind of life worth the trouble of getting up every morning.  He could not see the use of working for money, when money brought nothing one wanted.  Mrs. Erlich said it brought security.  Sometimes he thought this security was what was the matter with everybody; that only perfect safety was required to kill all the best qualities in people and develop the mean ones.