Ben Blair

Scotty cleared his throat. "I used to think, when I first came here, that I'd been a fool; but now, somehow, at times like this, I wonder if I didn't blunder into the wisest act of my life." The prairie spirit had taken hold of him. "And the longer I stay the more it grows upon me that such a life as this, where one's success is not the measure of another's failure, is the only one to live. It is the only life," he added after a pause.

Rankin said nothing.

Scotty was silent for a moment, but the mood was too strong for him to remain so, and he went on.

"I know the ordinary person would laugh if I said it, but really, I believe I'm developing a distaste for money. It's simply another term for caste; and that word, with the unreasoning superiority it implies, has somehow become hateful to me." He looked up into the night.

"I used to think I was happy back in England. I had my home and my associates; born so, because their fathers were friends of my father, their grandfathers of my grandfather's class. As a small landlord I had my gentlemanly leisure; but as well as I know my name, I realize now that I could never return to that life again. Looking back, I see its intolerable narrowness, its petty smugness. By comparison it's like the relative clearness of the atmosphere there and here. There, perhaps I could see a few miles: here, I look away over leagues and leagues of distance. It's symbolic." The voice paused; the face, turned directly toward his companion's, tried in the half-darkness to read its expression. "I've been in this prairie country long enough now to realize that financially I've made a mistake. I can earn a living, and that's all; but nevertheless I'm happy--happier than I ever realized it was possible for me to be. I've got enough--more would be a burden to me. If I have a trouble in the world, it's because I see the inevitable prospect of money in the future,--money I don't want, for I'm an only son and my father is comparatively wealthy. Without turning his hand, his rent-roll is five thousand pounds a year. He's getting along in life. Some day--it may be five years, it may be fifteen--he will die and leave it to me. I am to maintain and pass on the family name, the family dignity. It was all cut and dried generations back, generations before I was born."

Still Rankin said nothing. For any indication he gave, the other's revelation might have been only that he had a hundred dollars deposited in the savings bank against a rainy day.