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 "Nothing like a good opinion of oneself," Gordon replied, good-naturedly.

Overman nodded.

"I never heard you explain so beautifully that 'Back to Nature' idea. I went West once and lived a year with some red folks who have been so fortunate as to never get away from Nature. They have been doing business at the same stand for several thousand years. Their women are old hags at your wife's age, and their men die at mine—forty-five. Their social institutions are an exact reflection of their personal attainments."

"But we propose," Gordon flashed, "to make institutions an advance on man's attainments and so lead him onward and upward."

"Exactly," he answered, dryly. "Make human nature divine by writing it on paper that it is so, pile water into a pyramid upside down, and repeal the law of gravitation by the vote of a mob. I don't like the law of gravitation myself, but I haven't time to repeal it."

"You are a hopeless materialist."

"Yet you, who preach the Spirit, propose to build a heaven here out of mud."

"Socialism may be the great delusion, but it's coming. It sweeps the imagination of the world," Gordon cried, with enthusiasm.

"There you go! Every time I pin you down, you sail off into space with prophecy or poetry. If it does conquer the world, the world will not be worth