"Oh,  no,  I'm  not,"  said  Maude,  "I  don't  know  what
Socialism  is.  I'm  talking  about  something  that  anyone
who  is  not  dazzled  by  all  this  luxury  we  are  living  in  might
be  able  to  see,  about  something  which,  when  it  comes,  we
shan't  be  able  to  help."

I  ridiculed  this.  "The  prophecy  itself  did  not  disturb  me
half  as  much  as  the  fact  that  she  had  made  it,  as  this  new
evidence  that  she  was  beginning  to  think  for  herself,  and
along  lines  so  different  from  my  own  development.
298  A  FAR  COUNTRY


While  it  lasted,  before  novelists,  playwrights,  professors
and  ministers  of  the  Gospel  abandoned  their  proper  sphere
to  destroy  it,  that  Golden  Age  was  heaven ;  the  New  Jeru-
\  salem  —  in  which  we  had  ceased  to  believe — would  have  been
in  the  nature  of  an  anticlimax  to  any  of  our  archangels  of
finance  who  might  have  attained  it.  The  streets  of  our  own
city  turned  out  to  be  gold ;  gold  likewise  the  acres  of  unused,
scrubby  land  on  our  outskirts,  as  the  incident  of  the  River-
side Franchise  —  which  I  am  about  to  relate  —  amply
proved.
That  scheme  originated  in  the  alert  mind  of  Mr.  Fred-
erick Grierson,  and  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  it  has  since
become  notorious  in  the  eyes  of  a  virtue-stricken  pubUc,  it
was  entered  into  with  all  innocence  at  the  time:  most  of
the  men  who  were  present  at  the  "magnate's"  table  at  the
Boyne  Club  the  day  Mr.  Grierson  broached  it  will  vouch
for  this.  He  casually  asked  Mr.  Dickinson  if  he  had  ever
noticed  a  tract  lying  on  the  river  about  two  miles  beyond
the  Heights,  opposite  what  used  to  be  in  the  old  days  a  road
house.
