And here's your world, Martin, wherein every one is kind and careless, and generous and good, and full of smiles and gayety.

And there's Lige Bemis' world, full of cunning and hypocrisy, and meanness and treachery and plotting--a hell of a world it is, with its foundations on hate and deceit--but it's his world, and he has the same right to it that I have to mine.
And there's old Watts' world--" The general sighted along the poker over his toe to the stove side whereon a cornucopia wriggled out of nothing and poured its richness of fruit and grain into nothing.
"There's Watts' world, full of stuffed Personifications, Virtue, Pleasure, Happiness, Sin, Sorrow, and God knows what of demigods, with the hay of his philosophy sticking out of their eyeholes.

You know about his maxims, Mart; he actually lives by 'em, and no matter how common sense yells at him to get off the track, old Watts just goes on following his maxims, and gets butted into the middle of next week." The colonel was making a hole in the stick in his hands, and his attention was fixed on the whittling, but he added, "And your own world, General--how about your own world ?" "My world," replied the general, as he pulled at the bows of his rather soiled white tie, and evened them, "My world--" the general jabbed the poker spear-like into the floor, "I guess I'm a kind of a transcendentalist!" The colonel blew the chips through the hole in his stick; he bored it round in the pause that followed before he spoke.
"A transcendentalist, eh?
Well, pintedly, General, that is what I may call a soft impeachment, as the poet says--a mighty soft impeachment.
I've heard you called a lot worse names than that--and I may say," here the crow's-feet began scratching for a smile around the colonel's eyes, "proved, sir, with you as the prosecuting witness." The two men chuckled.

Then the general, balancing himself, with the poker point on the floor, as he tilted back went on: "My world, Mart Culpepper, is a world in which the ideal is real--a world in a state of flux with thoughts of to-day the matter of to-morrow; my world is a world of faith that God will crystallize to-day's aspirations into to-morrow's justice; my world," the general rose and waved his poker as if to beat down the forces of materialism about him, "my world is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen." He paused.

"As I was saying," he continued at last, "if this is a real world, if matter actually exists and this world is not a dream of my consciousness, whose world is it, my world, your world, Watts McHurdie's world, Lige's world, or John's world?
It can't be all of 'em." He put the poker across the stove hearth, and sank his hands deeply into his pockets as he continued: "The question that philosophy never has answered is this: Am I a spectre and you an essence, or are you a spectre and am I an essence?
Is it your world or mine ?" The two men looked instinctively at the rattling doorknob, and John Barclay limped into the room.