"

The little man's eyes twitched nervously.

"Why, it _usually_ means--"

"It _always_ means brainy and well-educated," interrupted Amory. "It
means having an active knowledge of the race's experience." Amory
decided to be very rude. He turned to the big man. "The young man," he
indicated the secretary with his thumb, and said young man as one
says bell-boy, with no implication of youth, "has the usual muddled
connotation of all popular words."

"You object to the fact that capital controls printing?" said the big
man, fixing him with his goggles.

"Yes--and I object to doing their mental work for them. It seemed to
me that the root of all the business I saw around me consisted in
overworking and underpaying a bunch of dubs who submitted to it."

"Here now," said the big man, "you'll have to admit that the laboring
man is certainly highly paid--five and six hour days--it's ridiculous.
You can't buy an honest day's work from a man in the trades-unions."

"You've brought it on yourselves," insisted Amory. "You people never
make concessions until they're wrung out of you."

"What people?"

"Your class; the class I belonged to until recently; those who by
inheritance or industry or brains or dishonesty have become the moneyed
class."

"Do you imagine that if that road-mender over there had the money he'd
be any more willing to give it up?"

"No, but what's that got to do with it?"

The older man considered.

"No, I'll admit it hasn't. It rather sounds as if it had though."

"In fact," continued Amory, "he'd be worse. The lower classes are
narrower, less pleasant and personally more selfish--certainly more
stupid. But all that has nothing to do with the question."

"Just exactly what is the question?"

Here Amory had to pause to consider exactly what the question was.

*****

AMORY COINS A PHRASE

"When life gets hold of a brainy man of fair education," began Amory
slowly, "that is, when he marries he becomes, nine times out of ten, a
conservative as far as existing social conditions are concerned. He may
be unselfish, kind-hearted, even just in his own way, but his first job
is to provide and to hold fast. His wife shoos him on, from ten thousand
a year to twenty thousand a year, on and on, in an enclosed treadmill
that hasn't any windows. He's done! Life's got him! He's no help! He's a
spiritually married man."

Amory paused and decided that it wasn't such a bad phrase.

"Some men," h