
to be found in the world. He read English society novels, wherein he caught
glimpses of men and women talking politics and philosophy. And he read of salons
in great cities, even in the United States, where art and intellect congregated.
Foolishly, in the past, he had conceived that all well-groomed persons above the
working class were persons with power of intellect and vigor of beauty. Culture
and collars had gone together, to him, and he had been deceived into believing
that college educations and mastery were the same things.
    Well, he would fight his way on and up higher. And he would take Ruth with
him. Her he dearly loved, and he was confident that she would shine anywhere. As
it was clear to him that he had been handicapped by his early environment, so
now he perceived that she was similarly handicapped. She had not had a chance to
expand. The books on her father's shelves, the paintings on the walls, the music
on the piano - all was just so much meretricious display. To real literature,
real painting, real music, the Morses and their kind, were dead. And bigger than
such things was life, of which they were densely, hopelessly ignorant. In spite
of their Unitarian proclivities and their masks of conservative broadmindedness,
they were two generations behind interpretative science: their mental processes
were mediæval, while their thinking on the ultimate data of existence and of the
universe struck him as the same metaphysical method that was as young as the
youngest race, as old as the cave-man, and older - the same that moved the first
Pleistocene ape-man to fear the dark; that moved the first hasty Hebrew savage
to incarnate Eve from Adam's rib; that moved Descartes to build an idealistic
system of the universe out of the projections of his own puny ego; and that
moved the famous British ecclesiastic to denounce evolution in satire so
scathing as to win immediate applause and leave his name a notorious scrawl on
the page of history.
    So Martin thought, and he thought further, till it dawned upon him that the
difference between these lawyers, officers, business men, and bank cashiers he
had met and the members of the working class he had known was on a par with the
difference in the food they ate, clothes they wore, neighborhoods in which they
lived. Certainly, in all of them was lacking the something more which he found
in himself and in the books. The Morses had shown him the best their social
position could produce, and he was not impressed by it. A pauper himself
