“Because I’m what they call a do-gooder. Do-gooders are considered tiresome. They’re not dramatic. The average person—if there is an average person—at least, the everyday human being—has admiration for ruthlessness and boldness. Especially in a virile country like the United States. What makes the front page? Crime and war and ruthlessness. People like to read about them and hear about them and look at them in plays and moving pictures and on this new television. Robin Hood and Jesse James. And then the Railroad Kings, the Land Kings, the Wheat Kings the Oil Kings all the Money Kings of America. The marauders. The Robber Barons of the United States. People marveled and wagged their heads, and they weren’t altogether wrong. These bold high-handed men settled the land, in a way, and harnessed the rivers and chopped down the forests and worked the great metal deposits of copper and silver and ore. I don’t think any other country in the world could have survived such depredation, but there was so much here. It seemed inexhaustible. But it wasn’t. It isn’t. Not any more. It’s going. Even Alaska, the unknown place, the last frontier, isn’t a frontier any more, rich as it is it will soon be done for. The new Robin Hoods and Jesse Jameses have it, clever and bold and ruthless and power-hungry, just like the old days, the bad old days. They will leave this wonderful country barren, like a woman who has had to bear too many children in her youth. The forests are dwindling, and the waterways, and the millions of creatures of the sea and the forest—the salmon and the seal and the bear and the moose and the deer.”

He was declaiming now, she knew he was quoting from his book, the book he had been writing ever since she could remember, though she never had seen a line of it. Suddenly she saw him, a prophet without honor in his own country. “Don’t, Grampa darling. They’ll read it. They’ll know. They will.”

But he went on, he seemed not to have heard her. “They have marched across a continent and now they have reached far into this great ice palace and plundered it. It’s the last treasure-trove, it’s the end. No one stops them. Perhaps someday this incredible America will be like India, like the barren over-populated countries of the East, like China, and only the few will know what it means to have a satisfied full stomach once a day or once a week or even once a month. Who says it can’t be true if this keeps on!”

He had forgotten the girl, he had forgotten the boat, the time, the reason that had loosed the flood of words. He was shocked into awareness by a sound from her. Christine was weeping. Unchecked, the tears brimmed and ran down her cheeks. Stricken, he stared at her.

“My darling girl, what is it! What’s wrong! What have I said!”

His great arm about her as though she were a little child.