“Then I will convince you,” said he.  “Look at the French—­the most brilliant nation intellectually among all the European peoples.  Where are they in the race to-day?  The evolutionist sees in them familiar symptoms of a retrogression which rarely ends but in one way.  Look at the Greeks.  Every schoolboy knows that the Greeks were vastly the intellectual superiors of any dominant people of to-day.  An anthropologist of standing assures us that the intellectual interval separating the Greek of the Periclean age from the modern Anglo-Saxon is as great as the interval between the Anglo-Saxon and the African savage.  Point to a man alive to-day who is the intellectual peer of Aristotle, Plato, or Socrates.  Yet where are the Greeks?  What did their exalted intellectual equipment do to save them in the desperate struggle for the survival of the fittest?  The Greeks of to-day are selling fruit at corner stands; Plato’s descendants shine the world’s shoes.  They live to warn away the most casual evolutionist from the theory that intellectual supremacy necessarily means supremacy of type.  Where, then, you may ask, does lie the principle of triumphant evolution?  Here we stand at the innermost heart of every social scheme.  Let us glance a moment,” said Mr. Queed, “at Man, as we see him first emerging from the dark hinterlands of history.”

So, walking through the sweet autumn woods with the one girl he knew in all the world—­barring only Miss Miller—­Queed spoke heartily of the rise and fall of peoples and the destiny of man.  Thus conversing, they came out of the woods and stood upon the platform of the rudimentary station.

The line ran here on an elevation, disappearing in the curve of a heavy cut two hundred yards further north.  In front the ground fell sharply and rolled out in a vast green meadow, almost treeless and level as a mill-pond.  Far off on the horizon rose the blue haze of a range of foothills, upon which the falling sun momentarily stood, like a gold-piece edge-up on a table.  Nearer, to their right, was a strip of uncleared woods, a rainbow of reds and pinks.  Through the meadow ran a little stream, such as a boy of ten could leap; for the instant it stood fire-red under the sun.

Sharlee, obtaining the floor for a moment, asked Queed how his own work had been going.  He told her that in one sense it had not been going at all:  not a chapter written from May to September.

“However,” he said, with an unclouded face, “I am now giving six hours a day to it.  And it is just as well to go slow.  The smallest error of angle at the centre means a tremendous going astray at the circumference.  I—­ahem—­do not feel that my summer has been wasted, by any means.  You follow me?  It is worth some delay to be doubly sure that I put down no plus signs as minuses.”

“Yes, of course.  How beautiful that is out there, isn’t it?”

His eyes followed hers over the sunset spaces.  “No, it is too quiet, too monotonous.  If there must be scenery, let it have some originality and character.  You yourself are very beautiful, I think.”