“Well, then, I believe he would.  And you’ve never seen anything, Basil, to make you really think that Mr. Fulkerson didn’t appreciate you to the utmost.”

“I think I came pretty near an undervaluation in that Lindau trouble.  I shall always wonder what put a backbone into Fulkerson just at that crisis.  Fulkerson doesn’t strike me as the stuff of a moral hero.”

“At any rate, he was one,” said Mrs. March, “and that’s quite enough for me.”

March did not answer.  “What a noble thing life is, anyway!  Here I am, well on the way to fifty, after twenty-five years of hard work, looking forward to the potential poor-house as confidently as I did in youth.  We might have saved a little more than we have saved; but the little more wouldn’t avail if I were turned out of my place now; and we should have lived sordidly to no purpose.  Some one always has you by the throat, unless you have some one else in your grip.  I wonder if that’s the attitude the Almighty intended His respectable creatures to take toward one another!  I wonder if He meant our civilization, the battle we fight in, the game we trick in!  I wonder if He considers it final, and if the kingdom of heaven on earth, which we pray for—­”

“Have you seen Lindau to-day?” Mrs. March asked.

“You inferred it from the quality of my piety?” March laughed, and then suddenly sobered.  “Yes, I saw him.  It’s going rather hard with him, I’m afraid.  The amputation doesn’t heal very well; the shock was very great, and he’s old.  It ’ll take time.  There’s so much pain that they have to keep him under opiates, and I don’t think he fully knew me.  At any rate, I didn’t get my piety from him to-day.”

“It’s horrible!  Horrible!” said Mrs. March.  “I can’t get over it!  After losing his hand in the war, to lose his whole arm now in this way!  It does seem too cruel!  Of course he oughtn’t to have been there; we can say that.  But you oughtn’t to have been there, either, Basil.”

“Well, I wasn’t exactly advising the police to go and club the railroad presidents.”

“Neither was poor Conrad Dryfoos.”

“I don’t deny it.  All that was distinctly the chance of life and death.  That belonged to God; and no doubt it was law, though it seems chance.  But what I object to is this economic chance-world in which we live, and which we men seem to have created.  It ought to be law as inflexible in human affairs as the order of day and night in the physical world that if a man will work he shall both rest and eat, and shall not be harassed with any question as to how his repose and his provision shall come.  Nothing less ideal than this satisfies the reason.  But in our state of things no one is secure of this.  No one is sure of finding work; no one is sure of not losing it.  I may have my work taken away from me at any moment by the caprice, the mood, the indigestion of a man who has not the qualification for knowing whether I do it well, or ill.  At my time of life—­at