 of the streets, the
rags of the dirty men harmonized excellently with the eruption of the damp,
rubbishy sheets of paper soiled with printers' ink. The posters, maculated with
filth, garnished like tapestry the sweep of the curbstone. The trade in
afternoon papers was brisk, yet, in comparison with the swift, constant march of
foot traffic, the effect was of indifference, of a disregarded distribution.
Ossipon looked hurriedly both ways before stepping out into the cross-currents,
but the Professor was already out of sight.
 

                                       V

The Professor had turned into a street to the left, and walked along, with his
head carried rigidly erect, in a crowd whose every individual almost overtopped
his stunted stature. It was vain to pretend to himself that he was not
disappointed. But that was mere feeling; the stoicism of his thought could not
be disturbed by this or any other failure. Next time, or the time after next, a
telling stroke would be delivered - something really startling - a blow fit to
open the first crack in the imposing front of the great edifice of legal
conceptions sheltering the atrocious injustice of society. Of humble origin, and
with an appearance really so mean as to stand in the way of his considerable
natural abilities, his imagination had been fired early by the tales of men
rising from the depths of poverty to positions of authority and affluence. The
extreme, almost ascetic purity of his thought, combined with an astounding
ignorance of worldly conditions, had set before him a goal of power and prestige
to be attained without the medium of arts, graces, tact, wealth - by sheer
weight of merit alone. On that view he considered himself entitled to undisputed
success. His father, a delicate dark enthusiast with a sloping forehead, had
been an itinerant and rousing preacher of some obscure but rigid Christian sect
- a man supremely confident in the privileges of his righteousness. In the son,
individualist by temperament, once the science of colleges had replaced
thoroughly the faith of conventicles, this moral attitude translated itself into
a frenzied puritanism of ambition. He nursed it as something secularly holy. To
see it thwarted opened his eyes to the true nature of the world, whose morality
was artificial, corrupt, and blasphemous. The way of even the most justifiable
revolutions is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds. The
Professor's indignation found in itself a final cause that absolved him from the
sin of turning to destruction as the agent of his ambition. To destroy public
faith in legality was the imperfect formula of his pedantic fanaticism; but the
subconscious conviction that the framework of an established
