“Well, it’s only that they should take up their Treasure, abolish all this business of the Ward, and with the proceeds of the jewels buy themselves a tract of land in which the law could protect them from the encroachments of House-Folk and Far-Folk alike. I know a man in the forestry bureau who would be able to tell me how it could be managed.”
He said that with so great an implied indifference to any objection I might entertain, that I began to feel a very quick resentment. I began to wonder if that old inclusive sympathy had ever been at all, if indeed it had not grown, as I felt this whole Outland experience to have done, out of my expectant wish for it.
“It would mean so much to us ... to those of us who care about such things,” he corrected himself, as if already a little less sure of me, “to have their social system working in plain sight. Their notions of the common good ... I’ve talked with the men a bit ... what they’ve worked out without any of our encumbrances, if they could take it up now with all our practical advantages—the University might establish a sort of protectorate——But you don’t seem to care for the idea, Mona.”
I don’t know what I thought of the idea as a solution of the troubles of the Outliers. I thought of a great many practical objections afterward, but just then I knew what I thought of Herman for proposing it.
They were our Outliers—or I might have said _my_ Outliers, for I had imagined them, believed in them and discovered them. It was only Herman’s interest in me which had brought him within their borders. It was a unique and beautiful experience, and it was ours. We had said that and had felicitated ourselves so many times on its being an experience we were having together. If we forgot it we must have even our forgetfulness in common as we had so many things—and here was Herman willing to throw it open to the world as an experiment in sociology. If Herman felt that way about it, how was I to claim that exquisite excluding community of interest in which the adventure had begun!
“I daresay,” I answered quickly, for I had thought all this while he talked to me, “that it is as good as most ideas of yours, but it doesn’t interest me.” And I walked away and left him staring into the water.