pon rolling hills. What the
city lacks of spaciousness is compensated by action. Life goes at a
great pace.

It made a profound impression on Thompson, since he had reached the
stage where he was keenly susceptible to external impressions from any
source whatever. Those hurrying multitudes, that unending stir, the
kaleidoscopic shifts of this human antheap made him at first profoundly
lonely, immeasurably insignificant, just as the North had made him feel
when he was new to it. But just as he had shaped himself to that
environment, so he felt--as he had not at first felt in the North--that
in time, with effort, he would become an integral part of this. Here the
big game was played. It was the antithesis of the North inasmuch as all
this activity had a purely human source and was therefore in some
measure akin to himself. The barriers to be overcome and the problems to
be solved were social and monetary. It was less a case of adapting
himself by painful degrees to a hostile primitive environment than a
forthright competitive struggle to make himself a master in this sort of
environment.

How he should go about it he had no definite idea. He would have to be
an opportunist, he foresaw. He had no illusions about his funds in hand
being a prime lever to success. That four hundred dollars would not last
forever, nor would it be replenished by any effort save his own. It
afforded him a breathing spell, a chance to look about, to discover
where and how he should begin at the task of proving himself upon the
world.

He had no misgivings about making a living. He could always fall back
on common labor. But a common laborer is socially of little worth,
financially of still less value. Thompson had to make money--using the
phrase in its commonly accepted sense. He subscribed to that doctrine,
because he was beginning to see that in a world where purchasing power
is the prime requisite a man without money is the slave of every
untoward circumstance. Money loomed before Thompson as the key to
freedom, decent surroundings, a chance to pursue knowledge, to so shape
his life that he could lend a hand or a dollar to the less fortunate.

He still had those stirrings of altruism, a ready sympathy, an instinct
to help. Only he saw very clearly that he could not be of any benefit to
even a limited circle of his fellow men when at every turn of his hand
economic pressure bore so hard upon him as an individual. He began to
see that getti