ross
words with Monet, senior. It was inevitable that he would win in the
end. He was a child ... he always would be one ... and childhood might
be cowed, but it was never really conquered. He was gentle, too, like
a child, and sensitive. Yet the horrors which surrounded him seemed to
leave him untroubled. It could not be that he was insensible to
ugliness, but he rose above it on the wings of some inner beauty...
Once Fred Starratt would have felt some of the father's scorn for
Felix Monet--the patronizing scorn most men bring to an estimate of
the incomprehensible. What could one expect of a fiddler? Yes, he
would have felt something worse than scorn--he would have been moved
to tolerance.

The only other man in Ward 1 who was sane was Clancy, the newspaper
reporter. But in the afternoons the knot of rational inmates from the
famous Ward 6 herded together and exchanged griefs. Fred Starratt sat
and listened, but he felt apart. Somehow, most of the stories did not
ring quite true. He never had realized before how eager human beings
were to deny all blame. To hear them one would fancy that the busy
world had paused merely to single them out as targets for misfortune.
And the more he listened to their doleful whines the more he turned
the searching light of inquiry upon his own case. In the end, there
was something beyond reserve and arrogance in the reply he would make
to their direct inquiries:

"What brought me here? ... Myself!"

But his attitude singled him out for distrust. He was incomprehensible
to these burden shifters, these men who had been trained to cast their
load upon the nearest object and, failing everything else, upon the
Lord... They were all either drug users or victims of drink. And, to a
man, they were furiously in favor of prohibition with all the strength
of their weak, dog-in-the-manger souls. Like every human being, they
hated what they abused. They wanted to play the game of life with
failure eliminated, and the god that they fashioned was a venerable
old man who had the skill to worst them, but who genially let them
walk away with victory.

As Fred Starratt listened day after day to their chatter he withdrew
more and more from any mental contact with them. And yet there were
times when he felt a longing to pour out his grief into the ears of
understanding... He knew that Monet was waiting for his story, but
pride still held him in its grip... After all, there was a ridiculous
side to his