Page:The Yellow Book - 02.djvu/29

Rh were he still a man and intelligent. The chief good is rising above petty irritation, petty contentiousness; it is patience with ills that must last long; it is choosing to build out the east wind instead of running at it with a sword."

"And, if I remember aright, you never had that sword out of your hand."

"From twenty years old to fifty, never out of my hand. But there were excuses—no, but more than excuses; remember that that was another time. Now how different it is, and what satisfaction to have lived to see the change!"

"And what is the change you are thinking of!"

"One that I have read of—only he must not flatter himself that he alone could find it out—in some Review articles of an old friend of Vernet's whose portrait is before me now." And then, a little to my distress, but more to my pleasure, he quoted from two or three forgotten papers of mine on the later developments of social humanity, the "evolution of goodness" in the elations of men to each other, the new, great and rapid extension of brotherly kindness; observations and theories which were welcomed as novel when they were afterwards taken up and enlarged upon by Mr. Kidd in his book on "Social Evolution."

"For an ancient conspirator and man of the barricades," continued Vernet, by this time pacing the room in the dusk which he would not allow to be disturbed, "for a blood-and-iron man who put all his hopes of a better day for his poor devils of fellow-creatures on the smashing of forms and institutions and the substitution of others, I am rather a surprising convert, don't you think? But who could know in those days what was going on in the common stock of mind by—what shall we call it? Before your Darwin brought out his explaining word 'evolution' I should have said that the change came about by a sort of mental chemistry; Rh