Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/19

Rh really call it, for that matter, anything in the world we like—the thing, for instance, we love it most for being.'

'I know what I call it,' said Dane after a moment. Then as his friend listened with interest: 'Just simply "The Great Good Place."'

'I see—what can you say more? I've put it to myself perhaps a little differently.' They sat there as innocently as small boys confiding to each other the names of toy animals. 'The Great Want Met.'

'Ah, yes, that's it!'

'Isn't it enough for us that it's a place carried on, for our benefit, so admirably that we strain our ears in vain for a creak of the machinery? Isn't it enough for us that it's simply a thorough hit?'

'Ah, a hit!' Dane benignantly murmured.

'It does for us what it pretends to do,' his companion went on; 'the mystery isn't deeper than that. The thing is probably simple enough in fact, and on a thoroughly practical basis; only it has had its origin in a splendid thought, in a real stroke of genius.'

'Yes,' Dane exclaimed, 'in a sense—on somebody or other's part—so exquisitely personal!'

'Precisely—it rests, like all good things, on experience. The "great want" comes home—that's the great thing it does! On the day it came home to the right mind this dear place was constituted. It always, moreover, in the long run, has been met—it always must be. How can it not require to be, more and more, as pressure of every sort grows?'

Dane, with his hands folded in his lap, took in these words of wisdom. 'Pressure of every sort is growing!' he placidly observed.

'I see well enough what that fact has done to you,' his Brother returned.

Dane smiled. 'I couldn't have borne it longer. I don't know what would have become of me.'