e a perfect youth of
the ancients marked for a sweet-scented offering to the gods, he was
to go his way in perfect freedom until his appointed time. There was
an element of grotesqueness in it all that dulled the edge of horror
which he should have felt.

Sometimes he would sally forth in a noonday sun, intent on solitude,
but usually he craved life and bustle and the squalor of cluttered
foregrounds. With his daily dole of silver jingling in his pocket he
went from coffeehouse to coffeehouse or drowsed an hour or two in a
crowded square or stood with his foot upon the rail of some
emasculated saloon, listening to the malcontents muttering over their
draughts of watery beer.

"Ah yes," he would hear these last grumble, "the rich can have their
grog... But the poor man--he can get it only when he is dying ...
providing he has the price."

And here would follow the inevitable reply, sharpened by bitter
sarcasm:

"But all this is for the poor man's good ... you understand. Men work
better when they do not indulge in follies... They will stop dancing
next. Girls in factories should not come to work all tired out on
Monday morning. They would find it much more restful to spend the time
upon their knees."

It was not what they said, but the tone of it, that made Fred Starratt
shudder. Their laughter was the terrible laughter of sober men without
either the wit or circumstance to escape into a temperate gayety of
spirit. He still sat apart, as he had done at Fairview and again at
Storch's gatherings. He had not been crushed sufficiently, even yet,
to mingle either harsh mirth or scalding tears with theirs. But he was
feeling a passion for ugliness ... he wanted to drain the bitter
circumstance of life to the lees. He was seeking to harden himself to
his task past all hope of reconsideration.

He liked especially to talk to the cripples of industry. Here was a
man who had been blinded by a hot iron bolt flung wide of its mark,
and another with his hand gnawed clean by some gangrenous product of
flesh made raw by the vibrations of a riveting machine. And there were
the men deafened by the incessant pounding of boiler shops, and one
poor, silly, lone creature whose teeth had been slowly eaten away by
the excessive sugar floating in the air of a candy factory. Somehow
this last man was the most pathetic of all. In the final analysis, his
calling seemed so trivial, and he a sacrifice upon the altar of a
petty vanity. Once