He wondered how much that eager, aching hunger stood
in the way of men's getting hold of life and living it earnestly and
purposefully, as he wanted to live it, and as he felt all men and women
wanted at bottom to live it. When he was a boy in Caxton he was more than
once startled by the flashes of brutality and coarseness in the speech and
actions of kindly, well-meaning men; now as he walked in the streets of
the city he thought that he had got past being startled. "It is a quality
of our lives," he decided. "American men and women have not learned to be
clean and noble and natural, like their forests and their wide, clean
plains."
He thought of what he had heard of London, and of Paris, and of other
cities of the old world; and following an impulse acquired through his
lonely wanderings, began talking to himself.
"We are no finer nor cleaner than these," he said, "and we sprang from the
big clean new land through which I have been walking all these months.
Will mankind always go on with that old aching, queerly expressed hunger
in its blood, and with that look in its eyes? Will it never shrive itself
and understand itself, and turn fiercely and energetically toward the
building of a bigger and cleaner race of men?"
"It won't unless you help," came the answer from some hidden part of him.
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