God breathed His spirit into the earth and it became a living man.
Man--His image--must breathe the spirit into the earth and make it a
living civilization.
His father, with a Gettysburg bullet bruising his life, had nevertheless
played the part, and done his share toward turning a frontier village
into a noble city. With a thrill Dick saw himself building the structure
higher on its firm foundations, making it great enough to match the wide
fertile acres that lay about it, and the dazzling Minnesota sky that
hung above. So he built his castle of achievement in the air, where his
own glory lay mistily behind his service to his fellow men. Already the
thing seemed done--vague and yet, somehow, concrete.
"Pooh, what is time? A mere figment of the imagination!" exclaimed Dick
suddenly. "Was it day before yesterday that I came home? Forty-eight
hours have put a gulf between the old and the new me. Condensed
time,--just add hot water and it swells to six times its original bulk."
His mother smiled indulgently at her son's vagaries of speech, and he
went on: "Moreover, I've been away four years,--years of vast importance, it
seems to me. I come back and everything is going on in the same old way.
Every one is interested in the same old things. They don't seem to think
anything exciting has happened, except that the city has doubled in size
and there has been another presidential election. They aren't a bit
stirred up over me. They aren't even deeply moved because Ellery over
there is wielding an inexperienced editorial pen. Everything is
familiar, but I've forgotten it all. It's hard to pick up the threads."
"More than that, boys. The threads are not all done up in a neat bunch
and handed to you as they are in New Haven. St. Etienne's point of view
is not always that of the gentleman and the scholar. Its great men are
not of the campus, but those who control the destinies of others,
sometimes by wealth, oftener by the genius of power. But, after all,
this is the real world."
Dick laughed again.
"And a world after my own heart, mother."
"Yes, I think you will fit in," she said with maternal complacency.
"Both of you," she added with sudden remembrance.
"The fitting-in on my part will have to be a process of swelling, I
guess," Norris said whimsically. "Small and narrow as is the berth I
have at the Star office, I shall have to be bigger than I am before I
fill it."
"Oh, you're all right. You're fundamentally all right, and that means
you'll rise to every opportunity you get." Dick's voice took on some of
the patronage of a leader for his follower. "I'd bank on Ellery Norris
if the rest of the world turned sour."