This, for a brief moment, brought the kindly though strong and sober face to immobility.
“You see, sir, I've come to feel that the best thing for me is to go back and---start clean.”
A slight mist came over Doane's eyes. What a struggle the boy had had of it! And how splendidly he was working through!.... Thought came about the children of the rich in America... the problem of it....
“I--couldn't go without seeing you. You see, sir, it's you, I guess, that've put me on my feet. I sort of--well, I want you to know that I _am_ on them. It's been a strange experience, all round. A terrible experience, of course. It shakes you....”
“It has shaken me, too,” Doane observed simply.
“I know. That is, I see all that more clearly now. I was going to speak of it--it's one of the things, but first.... Mr. Doane, will you write to me? Once in a while? I mean, will you--could you find time to answer if I write to you? You see, it isn't going to be easy, over there. I've got to go clean outside my own crowd. And outside my family. They won't one of them understand what I'm up to. Not one. And--when you come right down to it, I suppose it's a question whether the thing licks me or not. But”--his shoulders squared; he looked directly into that kind, deeply shadowed face--“I don't believe it will lick me!”
“I shall never be able to shake China off now. It's got me. And I don't know a thing about it yet. Of course I shall be reading and studying it up.”
“And I know I'm coming back out here someday. But it won't be as my father wants me to come. You see, I'll have money.”
“I know. I'm beginning to see that. But--I know all this must sound pretty young to you!--but I'm afraid I shall be leaning on you sometimes--”
“There is an amazing health in the American people.”
“It's a curiously blundering people, of course. And there's a hard, really a Teutonic strain--that blend of practical hard-headedness, even of cruelty, with sentimentality--”
Rocky's brows came together. Mr. Doane and his father plainly didn't use that word “sentimental” in the same sense, “--it comes down to a strain of--well, something between the old Anglo-Saxonism and the modern Prussianism. It's in us--in our driving business tactics, our narrow moral intolerance, our insistence on standardizing vulgar ideas--forcing every individual into a mold--in our extraordinary glorification of the salesman. We seem to have a good deal both of the British complacency and the rough aggressiveness of the German. But the health is there--wonderfully. What America needs is beauty--not the self-conscious swarming after it of earnest and misguided suburban ladies--but a quiet sense of the thing itself. Beauty--and simplicity--and patience--and tolerance--and faith. Prosperity has for the moment wrecked faith there. Simply too much money. But you'll find health growing up everywhere. Just let yourself grow with it. You've been deeply impressed by China. But if I were you, I'd let all that take care of itself. Never mind what you may come to feel next year or ten years from now. It may be mainly China or mainly America. Just work, and let yourself grow.”