“But what is your objection to it?” Herman had asked of me, sitting under the drawn flaps of Evarra’s hut, upon which the rain drummed hollowly. I had a great many objections, based upon my conviction that no amount of Treasure would buy immunity for the Outliers once they were made known to men. But all my reasons would have lacked their proper cogency with Herman, who was like the Outliers in being too honorable to predict dishonor on the part of others. I knew too little of business to forecast the hindrances likely to fall in the way. All I was sure of was that it was a mistake, first and last it was bound to be a mistake, and very little progress of the affair would prove it.
“If you think so well of their way of life,” said I, “why do you wish to change it? They wouldn’t be happy in our way; it wouldn’t agree with them.”
“If you’re thinking about happiness, how about Daria? And Zirriloë; do you call it happiness to be cut off from all that belongs to youth and loveliness? Why, the girl was made for loving.”
“But I thought that was something you didn’t believe in.”
He had the grace to blush here and to be disconcerted, but he protested:
“They believe in it—and I—sometimes I think I am only learning what it is to be alive. All alive, not just the intellect of me, like mistletoe at the top of a tree. And it’s good”—he scuffed with his feet strongly on the ground as though he liked the sting of it—“so good that I want to make it sure.” Before I could ask him what that had to do with making a sociological experiment of the Outliers, he had turned the argument again.
“Besides, Mona,” with almost an injured air, “I’m thinking of you. We know too much ever to be allowed to leave here in possession of all our faculties. Unless we go in some such way as I suggest, as emissaries to arrange for the title to their lands——”
“Yes,” I assented; “I hadn’t thought of that. We could go out that way, and then we needn’t say any more about it.”
“Well,” he admitted doubtfully, “that wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. That doesn’t seem quite—right, does it?”
I thought it would be as right as turning loose on the Outliers all the ills of our social disorder. But I didn’t feel like saying anything further just then. I sat and watched the sheeted rain that veiled the world a rod beyond our door, saw the sun break and silver it, and heard the wind calling from the high ridges.