, but that doesn't
make me a socialist any more than hearing Charley Hapgood orate made me a
Republican.«
    »I can't help it,« Mr. Morse said feebly, »but I still believe you incline
that way.«
    Bless me, Martin thought to himself, he doesn't know what I was talking
about. He hasn't understood a word of it. What did he do with his education,
anyway?
    Thus, in his development, Martin found himself face to face with economic
morality, or the morality of class; and soon it became to him a grisly monster.
Personally, he was an intellectual moralist, and more offending to him than
platitudinous pomposity was the morality of those about him, which was a curious
hotchpotch of the economic, the metaphysical, the sentimental, and the
imitative.
    A sample of this curious messy mixture he encountered nearer home. His
sister Marian had been keeping company with an industrious young mechanic, of
German extraction, who, after thoroughly learning the trade, had set up for
himself in a bicycle-repair shop. Also, having got the agency for a low-grade
make of wheel, he was prosperous. Marian had called on Martin in his room a
short time before to announce her engagement, during which visit she had
playfully inspected Martin's palm and told his fortune. On her next visit she
brought Hermann von Schmidt along with her. Martin did the honors and
congratulated both of them in language so easy and graceful as to affect
disagreeably the peasant-mind of his sister's lover. This bad impression was
further heightened by Martin's reading aloud the half-dozen stanzas of verse
with which he had commemorated Marian's previous visit. It was a bit of society
verse, airy and delicate, which he had named »The Palmist.« He was surprised,
when he finished reading it, to note no enjoyment in his sister's face. Instead,
her eyes were fixed anxiously upon her betrothed, and Martin, following her
gaze, saw spread on that worthy's asymmetrical features nothing but black and
sullen disapproval. The incident passed over, they made an early departure, and
Martin forgot all about it, though for the moment he had been puzzled that any
woman, even of the working class, should not have been flattered and delighted
by having poetry written about her.
    Several evenings later Marian again visited him, this time alone. Nor did
she waste time in coming to the point, upbraiding him sorrowfully for what he
had done.
    »Why, Marian,