like to its beginning. A stranger,
asking the reason of it, is answered in an off-hand way,--"Oh,
everybody'll tell you the same thing. There isn't a soul in the town but
hates him;" or, "Well, he's just the most popular man in the town. You'll
never hear a word said against him,--never; not if you were to settle
right down here, and live."

It was months before Stephen realized that there was slowly forming in the
town a dislike to him. He was slow in discovering it, because he had
always lived alone; had no intimate friends, not even when he was a boy.
His love of books and his passionate love of beauty combined with his
poverty to hedge him about more effectually than miles of desert could
have done. His father and mother had lived upon fairly good terms with all
their neighbors, but had formed no very close bonds with any. In the
ordinary New England town, neighborhood never means much: there is a
dismal lack of cohesion to the relations between people. The community is
loosely held together by a few accidental points of contact or common
interest. The individuality of individuals is, by a strange sort of
paradox, at once respected and ignored. This is indifference rather than
consideration, selfishness rather than generosity; it is an unsuspected
root of much of our national failure, is responsible for much of our
national disgrace. Some day there will come a time when it will have
crystallized into a national apathy, which will perhaps cure itself, or
have to be cured, as indurations in the body are, by sharp crises or by
surgical operations. In the mean time, our people are living, on the
whole, the dullest lives that are lived in the world, by the so-called
civilized; and the climax of this dulness of life is to be found in just
such a small New England town as Penfield, the one of which we are now
speaking.

When it gradually became clear to Stephen that he and his mother were
unpopular people, his first feeling was one of resentment, his second of
calm acquiescence: acquiescence, first, because he recognized in a measure
the justice of it,--they really did not care for their neighbors; why
should their neighbors care for them? secondly, a diminished familiarity
of intercourse would have to him great compensations. There were few
people in the town, whose clothes, whose speech, whose behavior, did not
jar upon his nerves. On the whole, he would be better content alone; and
if his mother could only have a littl